Third, Dr. Holly Prigerson, who is currently the Irving Sherwood Wright Professor of Geriatrics at Weill Cornell Medical College, and the Professor of Sociology in Medicine, and Director, Center for Research on End-of-Life Care, has research and authored studies focused on prolonged grief disorder, religious influences on end-of-life care, and “psychosocial and behavioral influences on medical care and care outcomes for patients and families confronting life-threatening illnesses and death, [and] cancer patient and caregiver quality of life and disparities in end-of-life care (Weill Cornell Medical College, n.d.).
In a study she conducted in 1992, Prigerson was interested in advancing the critically ill geriatric patients’ …show more content…
While researchers acknowledged that grief was normal, Prigerson et al. (2008) noted that past studies showed that some bereaved individuals had an increased rate of disability, medication use, and death. Prigerson and her colleagues did a study in which they proposed that some individuals experienced such debilitating and prolonged grief that it could be described as a clinically significant behavioral or psychological syndrome or pattern that occur[ed] in an individual and that [was] associated with present distress or disability’’ (Prigerson et al., 2008). They proposed a “psychometric validation of a diagnostic algorithm for PGD” [Prolonged Grief Disorder] (p. 9) that could be used to validate criteria in order to diagnose, treat, and include a new syndrome termed, Prolonged Grief Disorder (PGD) DSM-IV and in the ICD-11 as a distinct mental disorder because their study proved significant clinical “ psychological distress associated with substantial disability (Prigerson et al., 2008, p. 7). However, Wilson (2014) revealed that as of May 2013, the American Psychiatric Association, authors of DSM-5, changed little from the opinion taken in DSM-IV, in that grief can trigger a major depressive episode in some people, but they did not recognize a separate disorder known as prolonged or complicated …show more content…
According to Wilson (2014), a label of PGD or complicated grief would be medically beneficial if an individual is having intense, prolonged grief that is severely affecting daily life and needs treatment or a leave from work. But, Wilson (2014) also mentions that the pharmaceutical industry could be influential in convincing a significant number of people they have a treatable disorder when in fact, it is a completely normal human response to grief. In addition, Wilson (2014) indicated that some criticize the criteria used to determine impairment, many symptoms are actually normal reactions, and the time limit is not always