What prolonged grief disorder is, and what it is not

There is now a recognised condition for grief that stays at full intensity and stops a life from running. It is in both of the main diagnostic systems.

What it is not is a long grief. It is not still crying at the anniversary, still missing them daily, or still finding November hard three years later. Those are ordinary.

What it describes is grief that has not moved at all, well past the point where the systems set their threshold, and that is preventing a person from functioning.

We are not printing the criteria. The two systems set different time thresholds and word them differently, and we have not verified either wording against the printed source. A course that half remembers a diagnostic threshold and prints it is doing harm, so this one is telling you that the condition exists and that a clinician is the person who applies it.

There is no test in this course and there is no score. Nobody here is going to tell you which side of a line you are on.