Disenfranchised Grief Model

After a major loss such as the loss of a spouse or child, most people who are directly affected with that death will suffer detrimental effects on their mental, physical health, or both (Parkes, 1998). It is important to realize that the bereavement process is not something to be ignored as healing comes from going through all of the grieving stages. Health care providers have an important role in teaching patients and giving them knowledge about the problems in bereavement that can be prevented. Health care professionals can also help people prepare for such losses that are to come, and can encourage them to grieve in a healthy way. Sometimes the bereaved can be over-looked based on how they express their grief, or it can be downplayed by others. In her works titled “Disenfranchised Grief”, Gina Stepp explains that “there are certain circumstances in which a person experiences loss, but they don’t have a socially recognized
There are certain characteristics that make this differ from the normal grieving behavior model. For example, often times these individuals will have absent grief, delayed grief, chronic grief, or distorted grief. It is important, especially for clinicians to be able to identify the processes between normal and complicated grieving in order to know where to go next. That being said, the researchers talked about a model that is used for diagnostic reasons to distinguish what makes grief complicated. For example, a person might have a referral to visit a therapist if the individual has experienced three of these four criteria: “Intrusive thoughts about the deceased, yearning for the deceased, searching for the deceased or excessive loneliness since the death” (PDQ, 2014). There are three other segments of criterion, and although it might be helpful in determining who is experiencing complicated grief, the diagnostic tool hasn’t been formally