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February 17th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda THURSDAY, Feb. 16 (HealthDay News) — The loss of a loved one can
trigger deep emotional turmoil, but is the grief that follows a normal
part of being human or is it a form of mental illness in need of diagnosis
and treatment?
That’s the gist of a major debate now unfolding in the world of
psychiatry, as the American Psychiatric Association (APA) prepares to
issue the fifth edition of its seminal reference guide to mental disease,
the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
(DSM).
The issue: For the first time, the manual — a touchstone for mental
health professionals across the United States — may not exclude
the concept of “bereavement” from the constellation of behaviors and
experiences that it deems worthy of consideration when clinicians set out
to diagnose a major depressive disorder.
What does this mean? That feelings or outbursts accompanying the
passing of a family member or close friend — such as crying, insomnia,
fatigue, confusion and profound sadness — may now be viewed as a
treatable illness rather than as a normal reaction to life’s most
shattering moments.
Needless to say, not everyone agrees with this shift in thinking.
“To me, grief is a normal condition, not to be tagged with a diagnostic
code and to be treated,” stressed Dr. T. Byram Karasu, chairman of
psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Albert Einstein College of Medicine
and psychiatrist-in-chief at Montefiore Medical Center in New York City.
“Everyone loses someone in their lives at some point. So, this would be
classifying everyone at some point. No one would be immune to this.”
“And that does not make sense, because grief is a normal and very
healthy behavior,” said Karasu, who also chairs the APA’s National Task
Force on the treatment of depression. “One has to feel joy as well as pain
and depression, otherwise life is not worth living. And one should not
interrupt the grieving by medication or psychotherapy. You have to feel
the loss, and only by feeling the loss and recovering from it will the
person become a better person. Interrupted grief will remain unfinished
business.”
Karasu’s stance is in line with those expressed by the editorial board
of the British medical journal The Lancet, which lays out its
opposition to the new clinical approach in its Feb. 18 issue.
“Grief is not an illness,” the journal’s editors argue, noting that a
diagnostic change in the APA’s forthcoming manual would empower clinicians
to interpret any post-loss despair that endures beyond a two-week window
as a troubling sign of sickness rather than a standard sign of coping.
The Lancet team suggests that, instead, an intense but normal
bout of grief can last six months to a year, depending on the very
individualized nature of the particular relationship that has been severed
by death.
“Medicalising grief, so that treatment is legitimized routinely with
antidepressants, for example, is not only dangerously simplistic, but also
flawed,” the authors noted.
They acknowledged, however, that sometimes grief can morph into
something much more complicated, longer lasting and “pathological.” In
such instances, true clinical depression may ensue along the lines of a
so-called “prolonged grief disorder,” a potentially new designation now
under consideration by the World Health Organization. And such patients,
the board agreed, might stand to benefit from some form of mental health
intervention.
The concern over exactly when normal grief becomes a condition
that perhaps requires treatment is what’s driving the notion of inclusion
in the DSM, said University of California, San Diego, psychiatry professor
Dr. Sidney Zisook.
“It is well recognized that the death of a loved one, just like any
other serious stressor, [such as the] loss of a job, diagnosis of a fatal
illness, divorce can trigger a clinical depression,” he said. “The ensuing
depressive syndromes are no less severe or debilitating when brought on by
bereavement as they are after any other life event or, indeed, when the
depression seems to occur out of the blue.”
“Acknowledging that bereavement can be a severe stressor that may
trigger a clinical depression in a vulnerable person does not
medicalize or pathologize grief,” he suggested. “Rather, it prevents
clinical depression from being overlooked or ignored, and facilitates the
possibility of appropriate treatment.”
“This acknowledgment,” Zisook cautioned, “does not mean that we think
acute grief should end in days, weeks or even months. For some, it may
last for years, whether or not there is also a clinical depression. But,
acknowledging that clinical depression may also be present in some
bereaved individuals may go a long way towards helping those individuals
get on with their lives.”
For University of Michigan Medical School psychiatry professor Dr.
Randolph M. Nesse, the debate boils down to a tug-of-war between basic
common sense on the one hand and science’s search for diagnostic
consistency on the other.
“Everyone knows that grief is something that happens to everybody,” he
noted. “And just because an emotion feels bad doesn’t mean it’s wrong or
unhealthy. Most often it’s a common-sense response to a real problem.”
“So, my take is that it would be senseless to eliminate the grief
exclusion [from the DSM],” said Nesse, who is also a professor of
psychology at UM’s College of Literature, Science and the Arts. “But,
because it can be so damn hard to figure out when an emotion is normal or
not normal without really knowing what is going on in a person’s life,
there are undeniable advantages to having a neat, clean, simple check-box
kind of classification system for diagnosing depression. It makes it
easier. So, you include grief as a box to tick, whether or not there is a
real problem to be diagnosed.”
“But that is what is so troubling,” he added. “Because when someone
gets a diagnosis of depression it then encourages giving that person
treatment. And the getting of that treatment then pushes the person being
treated into believing they do indeed have a problem that needs
treatment to begin with. And that can be very unhelpful in many, many
cases in which grief is really a normal and healthy response to a life
event.”
More information
For more on bereavement, visit Mental Health America.
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