There is a joke that after enough years of practicing psychiatry, the profession becomes a diagnosis. For the leading figures in US psychiatry, this certainly seems true. They have added "prolonged grief" to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder, defining it as inability to return to previous activities a year after a loss.
To me, the idea that an individual who has suffered a loss is expected ever to get over it completely, is crazy. Yet the addition to the Manual will open a wide door to medicate people whose only "pathology" is still mourning their deceased parent, sibling, spouse or child two or three years after his death. Overmedicating people in pain is dangerous. Not so long ago, other medical professionals, including those of the FDA itself, helpfully guided by pharmaceutical companies eager to sell their painkillers, created an opioid epidemic which has killed hundred of thousands of people and still continues.
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