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Grief gets an expiration date, just like us

(bessstillman.substack.com)
461 points LaurenSerino | 2 comments | 18 Sep 25 14:17 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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aeturnum ◴[18 Sep 25 15:21 UTC] No.45290780[source]▶
> We medicalize grief because we fear it.

I think this is just incorrect. You are not obligated to seek treatment for most medical problems[1]. The point of medicalizing something is to draw a line between situations where it would be too soon for medical professionals to step in and when people enter a situation where they may need external help. One of the diagnostic criteria, which this article mentions, is that your grief is disrupting your life - but despite what this article claims they have misunderstood that criteria. Of course grief changes your routines and life. That change only becomes "disruptive" if you feel the change has somehow gone too far or you are struggling to undo it. This writer is doing neither and therefor does not meet the diagnostic criteria for disordered grief. They are grieving normally and the medical literate supports that understanding.

There are of course medical professionals who use diagnostic criteria as cudgels. Trying to force people to become patients in order to enforce their idea of what someone "should" want. This is a problem but it is a problem that the official diagnostic guidelines try to avoid. For those who are interested in this kind of problem with our medical system might look into the professional philosophy of doctors (generally arrayed around identifying and curing disease) and nursing (generally arrayed around making the patient comfortable as possible). I tend to think the nursing model is the more useful and sensible of the two - even though, of course, if one wants to cure a disease a doctor is helpful.

[1] There are very few diseases, such as tuberculosis, where you can be forced to treat the disease.

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1. munificent ◴[18 Sep 25 17:28 UTC] No.45292467[source]▶
I think you are misinterpreting what the author means with "medicalize". They aren't saying "require to be treated by a medical professional".

What they're saying is that as a culture, we reason about grief using the tools and concepts of the medical industry. Because it's part of our culture, this is so automatic that it's almost hard to conceive of any other way. But it is indeed a choice to describe grief as a sort of labeled pain which can be explored using falsifiable scientific experiments, is amenable to treatment by medical professionals, is a problem representing a delta between a "normal healthy human" and their current state, etc.

We could just as well have a culture that treats grief as a normal part of the human experience. We could consider a person currently grieving as exactly as healthy and normal as someone playing the saxophone. We could (and some do) consider that the most appropriate people to offer help for grief be spiritual counsellors.

I'm not saying we should handle grief differently. I'm just trying to point out that what the author's saying is that it's a cultural choice the way we present and work through it socially. (But, for what it's worth, I do think we should handle it in a less medical way.)

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2. aeturnum ◴[18 Sep 25 18:35 UTC] No.45293332[source]▶
I think what you are talking about is a problem. Having a medical diagnosis gives personal experience an extra weight in the social realm that's quite problematic. We should all get to say how impactful something for us and the medical folks can have their own standards for when they feel comfortable intervening.

That said, if that's what the author was trying to talk about, I think they are doing so in a way that unfairly indicts the medical system for assertions it doesn't make. They say "Apparently, that’s a disease", but as I said I do not think it is. I think they've misunderstood what makes a disease under the diagnostic criteria they list.

> We could just as well have a culture that treats grief as a normal part of the human experience.

That culture does exist. Even in this article there is an experience of grief that's considered normative in the medical community. Including, I would argue, the authors' grief. I would argue that the medical approach to grief is actually better than other western treatments of grief.

I agree that western cultures (and US culture in particular) is horrible about grief. We want people to be robotic and predictable and not make us think about loss and be sad in private and a whole mess of awful, inhuman things. But I don't think that pressure either comes from the medical community or is furthered by how the medical community talks about grief.