Why Some People Don't Grieve
By Carolyn Campbell
George Bonanno is an assistant professor of psychology and education at Columbia University. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University. His areas of research interest include stream of consciousness, repressive personality style, emotional avoidance, and the processes of grief and mourning.
In "Resilience to Loss and Chronic Grief: A Prospective Study From Pre-loss to 18 months Post-Loss," an empirical study to be published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Dr. Bonanno and his colleagues detail their research into patterns of bereavement following death.
The study examines a common, but perhaps misunderstood, trait — the lack of grief.
Discovery Health Online spoke to Dr. Bonanno about why some people don't grieve, along with other aspects of resilience that he has found in his research.
Q: Dr. Bonanno, your study dealt with patterns of grief following the loss of a loved one. What can you tell us about these patterns?
A: There are clear outcome patterns, but they vary with different people. There are generally three outcome patterns: chronic grief, common grief, and resilience or absent grief. Chronic grief is someone who has a dramatic, high level of depression and grief after a loss, and they don't get better for several years. The common grief pattern is usually people who show an elevation of symptoms — depression, distress, difficulty concentrating, etc., and somewhere within a year or two, they return to normal. And the third type are those who don't show any disruption in their normal functioning. And that last pattern is very common, sometimes up to half the people will show that.
Q: Is there a distinction between chronic grief and chronic depression?
A: In this study, I think we're the first study to ever do this, we also measure chronic depression. You have to be able to have data before the loss, and that's not easy to do. You can't really ask people that question after a loss because it's well known, it's well established, that depressed people tend to remember more negative events — it's called the depressive memory bias. When you're feeling sad, you remember sad things because memory works by cues. So we know that memory works that way, and we've been arguing that you can't really say that these people were depressed beforehand because they said they were, because you don't know. We measured depression beforehand and we separated out people who were chronically depressed from people who were not depressed and then became depressed after the loss. One of the things that we found in that study is that we had fewer people who really showed chronic grief, and one reason is because most everyone died of natural causes. When people are anticipating the loss, or the person dies of natural causes, it seems that that helps. The people who tend to have the most chronic grief, the most painful bereavement, are people who lose loved ones through sudden, violent death. If you know the loved one is dying, I think there's a chance to say goodbye to them, a chance to talk with them, to be with them and, for lack of a better word, process the fact that they're going to die. When people die sudden, violent deaths, it seems that the bereaved people, the survivors, replay it over and over in their minds because it has a traumatic flavor to it.
