Introduction

Abstract

Bereavement is so painful a stress that it can contribute to a wide range of psychiatric problems. It is personal vulnerability rather than grief that determines why some bereaved people suffer anxiety and panic attacks, others suffer major depression, and others take to bottle and end up with an alcoholic psychosis. Lindemann had assumed that most bereaved people were repressing their grief and needed help to express it. Anderson, writing in 1949, found that many bereaved people who sought psychiatric help after bereavement were not repressing their grief; far from it, they couldn't stop grieving. Author's own studies of bereaved people seeking psychiatric help showed that those who reported anxious-ambivalent attachments in their childhood responded to bereavement in later life with severe, protracted grief and a persisting tendency to cling. Such losses are frequently found in people seeking psychiatric help after bereavement. But psychiatrists are not the only professionals with a useful contribution to make to our understanding of bereavement.