Mad in America: Rethinking Mental Health
Health & Fitness:Mental Health
In March 2022, a new grief-related disorder was officially adopted into mainstream mental health diagnosis nomenclature. Prolonged Grief Disorder (PGD) is a recent addition to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual fifth edition text revision (DSM-5-TR). A PGD diagnosis is to be used when a person is grieving too long and too intensely.
In this interview, Kaori Wada, Psychologist, grief researcher, and Associate Professor and Director of Training at the University of Calgary, builds upon her recent paper on the Medicalization of Grief in conversation with MIA Science News Writer and Psychologist Zenobia Morrill. Wada articulates a history of institutional tensions and financial conflicts behind the creation of this new PGD diagnosis. She also discusses the ways PGD could shape how we collectively understand and respond to those grieving.
Wada’s work demonstrates that the creation of PGD was not based on scientific findings but appears to be entangled in long-standing arguments between camps of mental health professionals with different stakes in whether the diagnosis became legitimized. Further, PGD, as with other diagnoses, represents elements of mainstream psychological theory that tend to render deviations from Western cultural norms as “unhealthy.” Is diagnosis needed to provide support and care? If so, those most likely to experience marginalization, violence, and unjust loss are also most likely to be classified as having PGD, a mental illness.
At a time when the world is fraught with tragic loss—owing to causes ranging from political failures, state violence, and the COVID-19 pandemic—grieving has been transformed into a mental health disorder. But the complicated question of what a mental disorder is continues to be glossed over. The opportunity for psychiatric professionals to embrace humility seems to have reverted to the familiar “diagnose-and-treat” response. Will pharmacological intervention become the dominant “treat” response to a diagnosis of PGD?
A new grief disorder is a clear departure, however, from the way grief used to be described in the field as an example of something that is clearly not a mental health disorder, Wada shared. She exclaims: “To me, the medicalization of grief is controversial because it may fundamentally shake up the concept of a mental disorder, [how it has] been defined and understood.”
Wada and Morrill explore what this new PGD diagnosis may mean, reflecting on the ways the “diagnose-and-treat” logic seems to of experiences formerly considered part of the territory of being human. The need to pathologize experiences in order to address them represents a paradox. A new ethical and moral quandary befalls professionals tasked with determining when grief is an illness and when expressions of grief are inappropriate.
Will the public embrace this new disorder? Will the medicalization of grief be resisted? Will a pandemic of PGD diagnoses follow a global pandemic? Wada speaks to the personal and professional influences that shaped these curiosities and her approach to researching how grief is being construed in the mental health field.
Art and Transformation - Creating Justice in Mental Health Care
David Healy – Polluting Our Internal Environments: The Perils of Polypharmacy
Morgan Shields - Breaking Academia's Silence on Inpatient Psychiatry
Anders Sørensen - Tackling Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal Through Research and in Practice
Justin Karter - Exploring the Fault Lines in Mental Health Discourse
Jim Flannery - Sorry It's Not Funny – Comedy, Hip-Hop and Activism
Diana Rose - Is Service-User Research Possible in Mental Health?
Jon Jureidini – Evidence-Based Medicine in a Post-Truth World
Liam MacGabhann, Martha Griffin, Harry Gijbels and Elaine Browne - The Launch of Mad in Ireland
Beverley Thomson – Antidepressed - Antidepressant Harm and Dependence
John Read and Jeffrey Masson - Biological Psychiatry and the Mass Murder of “Schizophrenics”
Andrew Scull - Desperate Remedies: Psychiatry’s Turbulent Quest to Cure Mental Illness
Kristina Marusic - Pollution's Mental Toll
Jessica Taylor - Pathologized Since Eve - Women, Trauma, and Sexy but Psycho
Jock McLaren – The Biopsychosocial Model is a Mirage, Time for a Biocognitive Model?
Tara Thiagarajan - Mental Wellbeing Among Internet-enabled Populations of the World
Bruce Cohen - The Failings of “Mental Health”: How a Seemingly Benign Concept Might be Dangerous
Jennifer Barkin - New Tools to Support New Moms
Alice and Kenneth Thompson - Bringing Integrative Community Therapy to Pittsburgh
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
Good Mood Revolution
Mental Health Insights
MQ Open Mind
Speaking of Suicide
The Suicide Prevention Movement
Depression Talks Podcast