Prolonged Grief Disorder: "... We should stop fretting that we are grieving too long for someone who has passed to satisfy pseudo-psychiatric norms as to how long we should be upset by the death of a loved one.".

• Author: Vatz, Richard E.

THE American Psychiatric Association (APA) has done it again, officially coining another malady for its manual, Prolonged Grief Disorder (PGD), to add to its existing hundreds of clinical diagnoses. "Distinct from depression, prolonged grief is marked by a pervasive yearning for the deceased," maintains the American Psychological Association.

So, if one loses a child, the APA and American Psychological Association have discerned how long and how much you may be upset, or else you are officially mentally disordered, if so diagnosed. Good--something else for the grieving to worry about. What possible purpose is there in this new label except to add to the coffers and apparent significance of mental health professions?

Part of the brief against the APA and the prolificacy of psychiatric disorders--never "mental illnesses" in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: DSM-5-TR or its iterations in earlier manuals, a nosological norm unknown to the general public--is that the willy-nilly process nurtures the APA's self-appointed job to be nanny to the world.

After about a decade of internal debate, the APA decided to codify this new disorder, allegedly due to the inference that such naming allows for people suffering extended grief to be able to get insurance-paid-for treatment, however unproved the value of such treatment and the psychological downside of such labels to "patients."

There are voices in the APA and other helping professions who were silent in decades past when changes were made to the ostensibly medical profession of psychiatry, changes lacking protocols to prove validity for revisions in authentic somatic medicine.

In the early 2000s, when there was a movement to raise the estimates of those suffering from mental illness, responsible professionals like Paul R. McHugh, former psychiatrist-in-chief at Johns Hopkins University, greeted the changes with derision: "Fifty percent of Americans mentally impaired--are you kidding me?" He added, "The problem is that the diagnostic manual we are using in psychiatry is like a field guide, and it just keeps expanding and expanding___Pretty soon we'll have a syndrome for short, fat Irish guys with a Boston accent, and I'll be [declared] mentally ill."

The skepticism stems from not just the softness of psychiatric diagnosis, but the questionable nonmedical motives of those pushing the new diagnosis. Its real-world significance and, implicitly, its purpose, were summed up by...