Which considerations are lost when debating the prolonged grief disorder diagnosis?

Abstract

The Nordic countries are currently attempting to implement prolonged grief disorder as an official psychiatric diagnosis, as enacted by The World Health Organization in 2018. The enactment has been controversial and, especially in Denmark, the forthcoming diagnosis has met resistance from scholars and clinicians alike. In this article we will outline what we believe to be lost considerations during the debate of the so-called “grief diagnosis.” We argue that scholars’ attention should not focus on the diagnosis itself, but rather on the overall theoretical challenges in conceptualizing and handling mental suffering, which the debate should reflect and address. The article’s main purpose is to accentuate why we, as psychologists, must welcome the prolonged grief diagnosis, whilst simultaneously working to more actively politicize mental suffering in general, and criticize the societal function of diagnoses. This should be attained through dialogue and recognition between cultural psychologists and health psychologists.