Most grief does not need treatment. It needs a safe place to land, a nervous system that can metabolize it, and safe people to hold us through the process.
That is worth saying before anything else, because an article about grief treatment can accidentally imply that grief is a medical event requiring intervention, and it is not. It is what happens when something you were organised around is gone.
But for a minority of people, grief stops moving. A year later, two years later, the longing is still daily, the life around it has not resumed, and the person is not so much sad as stalled. Since 2022 that has had a name in the diagnostic manuals: prolonged grief disorder. The reason the name matters is not that it turns sorrow into pathology. It is that you cannot run a trial on something nobody has defined. Naming it is what made prolonged grief disorder treatment researchable.
So there are now trials. Several of them are good. And they say something more specific — and considerably more useful — than the internet does.
I am going through them here, including the parts that did not work, because I had some of this wrong, and I would rather be precise than reassuring.
We have it backwards, and somebody measured that
Before any of the treatment evidence, one finding about the rest of us.
Two samples of ordinary people — 510 in one study, 210 in another — were asked what counts as a normal response to a death. They were shown descriptions of adaptive grief, descriptions drawn from the five-stages model, and descriptions drawn from the diagnostic criteria for prolonged grief disorder. Then they rated how normal each one seemed.1
People endorsed the maladaptive responses as normal.
Sit with the consequences for a second, because they run in both directions and both of them hurt.
If you are grieving in a way that is actually working — functioning most days, sad in waves, able to laugh at dinner — you are measuring yourself against a public idea of grief that looks like the stuck version. So you conclude you are doing it wrong. Cold. Avoidant. Not grieving properly.
And if you are genuinely stalled, two years in, you are surrounded by people whose mental model says that is simply what grief looks like. Nobody raises it. Nobody suggests anything could help, because nothing appears to be wrong.
The same study found that the more strongly someone endorsed those responses as normal, the more strongly they believed grief must be worked through — and that a person who fails to work through it needs professional help.1 A belief that traces back to Freud in 1917 and has outlived most of the theory it came from.1
And here is where I have to stop myself, because the obvious next sentence is that these beliefs must therefore be harming people. Somebody has just tested that, and the answer is not the one I was reaching for.
A 2026 study set out to build the first proper instrument for measuring belief in grief stages. Sixty-four candidate items generated by experts, run through exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis, reduced to a nineteen-item scale with five distinct kinds of endorsement: positive, anxious, rigid, passive and prescriptive.2
Then they checked those beliefs against mental-health outcomes. Belief in stages may not be associated with adverse outcomes — and the factor capturing the most rigid endorsement showed a negative association with prolonged grief, depression and anxiety.2
The authors are careful, and so am I. It is correlational, on a predominantly female and well-educated convenience sample, and they say outright that the arrow could run the other way: how your grief has actually gone may shape what you believe about stages, rather than the reverse.2
It is also worth knowing whose finding this is. The author list includes Henk Schut and Margaret Stroebe — who built the dual process model, the framework that replaced stage theory in serious grief science — and Paul Boelen, whose randomised trial in bereaved children appears further down this page.2,11 These are not people with an interest in rehabilitating Kübler-Ross. They went looking for the harm, with the right instrument, and reported that they did not find it.
But keep the two questions apart, because nearly everybody collapses them. Do the stages describe how grief actually moves? No — that has been answered for decades. Does believing in them hurt you? That has only just become measurable, and the first real attempt says: possibly not.
Which means the trouble with the five stages may not be what they do to the bereaved. It may be what they do to everyone standing around the bereaved — including giving them the expectation that grief which does not look like that is not grief.
What prolonged grief disorder is, and what it is not
Prolonged grief disorder is defined clinically. It is identified by what a person is experiencing and for how long — not by a brain scan, not by a hormone test, not by an inflammatory marker. There is no laboratory test for grief, and anybody offering you one is selling something.
How common it is depends on who you ask and who you count. A meta-analysis across four continents produced a pooled prevalence of 9.8 per cent — though using a definition requiring only six months since the death, rather than the twelve months the current diagnosis asks for. Studies in populations facing traumatic or sudden loss have reported rates as high as 34.3 per cent.3 That spread is not sloppiness. It is what happens when symptom definitions, measurement tools and the time elapsed since the death all vary between studies.
This matters for reading the research. The trials below span two decades, and the older ones recruited people under earlier definitions — “complicated grief,” or pre-2022 criteria. Their participants should not be described as uniformly meeting the current diagnostic standard. It is the same territory, mapped slightly differently each time.
Why grief is unusually hard to study, and why that is not an excuse
There is a prior problem, and two philosophers of mind put it more clearly than the clinical literature does.
Grief, they argue, is neither a brief emotion nor a longer-term mood. It is a heterogeneous, temporally extended process — and most of what happens inside that process is not grief-specific at all. Sorting the post. Not sorting the post. Being unexpectedly fine on the anniversary. Dreading a song. Its course over time is shaped, in their account, by interpersonal, social and cultural environments.4
Which means grief is not a thing happening inside one skull on a timescale a scanner can capture. It is a long process running through a person and the people around them.
Hold that next to the sentence I opened with. Safe people to hold us through the process. That is not only a kind idea. If grief’s course is partly constituted by the relational environment it unfolds in, then who is around you is not support for the process — it is part of the mechanism.
That is a philosophical argument, not an experiment, and I am labelling it as one. But keep it in view, because the trial evidence turns out to point the same way.
The prolonged grief disorder treatment with the most randomised evidence behind it
In 2005, ninety-five adults were randomised to sixteen sessions of either complicated grief treatment or interpersonal psychotherapy — a credible, established therapy, not a waiting list. Response was fifty-one per cent with the grief-specific treatment against twenty-eight per cent with interpersonal therapy. The number needed to treat was 4.3: roughly four people treated for one additional person to respond who would not have otherwise.5
“Response” there means substantial clinical improvement. It does not mean remission, and it does not mean grief disappeared. Nobody has ever tested a treatment that makes someone un-bereaved.
A later trial recruited a hundred and fifty-one adults aged fifty and over, average age sixty-six. At twenty weeks, response was seventy and a half per cent against thirty-two per cent for interpersonal therapy — a relative risk of 2.20, and a number needed to treat of 2.56.6 Two consistent randomised results, one of them specifically in older people, who are both the most likely to be bereaved and the most likely to be left out of trials.
Now, what is actually in that treatment? Understanding grief. Managing emotion. Future goals. Relationships. Revisiting the death. Approaching reminders. And sustaining a meaningful connection with memories of the person.7
Read that list again, because it is the most interesting finding in this entire article, and it is hiding in a methods section.
The most-tested treatment for stuck grief is built out of going toward the loss. Deliberately, repeatedly, with someone. Not managing the symptoms down. Not getting over it. And explicitly not letting go — the protocol aims to sustain the connection, not sever it.
The structure of the thing that works is approach, not avoidance. Which is the same shape as the question of whether you can heal trauma without reliving it, and it has the same uncomfortable answer.
The newest head-to-head, and the number that gets quoted carelessly
In 2024, a hundred adults with prolonged grief disorder were randomised to eleven ninety-minute sessions of either grief-focused cognitive behavioural therapy or mindfulness-based cognitive therapy.
Immediately after treatment, the two groups did not differ significantly. At six months, the CBT group had done better: a difference of 7.1 points on the grief measure, with a between-group effect size of 0.8, which is large.8
Four things keep that honest. Both groups improved, and improvement inside a group is not evidence of superiority over ordinary care. The comparator was an active, real therapy, which makes the difference more impressive and also harder to attribute. Only sixty per cent of participants completed the six-month assessment — the analysis handled the missing data properly, but that much attrition is a material limit on how firmly anyone should hold the number. And the sample was predominantly female and from a single site.
It is a good trial. It is not a settled fact.
Is it the exposure that does it?
Someone eventually asked the obvious question. Eighty adults were randomised to group CBT plus individual sessions revisiting memories of the death, or the same group CBT plus individual supportive sessions. At six months, grief outcomes favoured the exposure condition.9
That supports exposure contributing within that package. It does not establish that every person needs identical exposure work, and it says nothing about why — a point I had previously got wrong by attaching a mechanism to it that no trial in this literature tested.
Then a larger German trial randomised two hundred and twelve adults to grief-specific CBT or present-centred therapy. Immediately after treatment, grief-specific CBT had a small advantage: an effect size of 0.31, with a confidence interval running from 0.03 to 0.57 — real, but only just. At the primary follow-up, twelve months after randomisation, the difference was 0.28 with an interval of −0.02 to 0.57, which crosses zero and is no longer statistically significant. Both groups had improved substantially from where they started.10
The honest reading of those two trials together: structured treatment helps, and grief-specific CBT is not reliably superior to every credible alternative at every time point. Which is a less tidy sentence than the ones that circulate, and closer to what was found.
Thirty trials, and the finding about access
A 2025 systematic review pulled together thirty randomised controlled trials published between 2011 and 2024. CBT came out as the predominant and most effective approach, and — this is the part that surprised me — it held up across individual, group and internet-delivered formats.3
Some of those internet numbers are not small. One trial of bereaved parents after pregnancy loss ran five weeks entirely online and produced a medium-to-large between-group effect. Another, in people bereaved by traffic accidents, reported large within-group change.3
And the same review reports dropout rates in internet-delivered trials ranging from 9.4 to 42.1 per cent.3
Both of those facts are the finding. Structured grief work delivered over the internet can produce real change, in people who would never reach a specialist clinic — and up to four in ten of them stop before the end. Which tells you something no effect size will: the obstacle in this work is rarely that the method does not function. It is that approaching the loss, on purpose, repeatedly, is extremely hard to keep doing. Especially alone, in a browser, with nobody waiting for you.
Children are not small adults
A hundred and thirty-four bereaved children and adolescents were randomised to CBT Grief-Help or supportive counselling, both including parallel sessions with parents and caregivers. CBT produced greater reductions in prolonged-grief symptoms across follow-ups, including at twelve months.11
Paediatric evidence is thinner than adult evidence, but it is not absent — and adult protocols and effect sizes should not simply be handed down to children.
What did not work, which is the part I find most clarifying
In 2016 a four-arm trial randomised three hundred and ninety-five adults to citalopram, placebo, grief treatment plus citalopram, or grief treatment plus placebo. Everybody in every arm received medication-management visits that included psychoeducation and encouragement to resume activities, so “placebo” here was never nothing.
Grief treatment plus placebo produced a grief response of 82.5 per cent, against 54.8 per cent for placebo with clinical management alone.
Adding citalopram to the grief treatment changed the grief response from 82.5 to 83.7 per cent. That is a p-value of .84 — statistically indistinguishable from no effect. What citalopram did improve was depressive symptoms, by about two points on its scale. And citalopram on its own was not significantly better than placebo for grief response at the trial’s pre-specified twelve-week assessment.12
So in the same trial, at the same time, in the same people: the therapy moved the grief, and the antidepressant moved the depression. Those are two different outcomes, and collapsing them is how “antidepressants help grief” became a thing people say. This does not mean medication is never appropriate — a co-occurring depression or anxiety disorder has its own indication and deserves its own treatment. It means medication has not been shown to treat the grief itself. The American Psychiatric Association’s current patient information identifies no established medication for grief-specific symptoms.13
Then there is naltrexone, which you may have read about as a promising trial of the grief-as-craving idea. The 2021 protocol planned forty-eight participants over eight weeks, triple-blinded.14 The registry record shows nine people enrolled and the study terminated for low accrual. Six initially received placebo and three naltrexone, and the eight-week symptom analysis included four placebo participants and one on naltrexone. The registry reports descriptive statistics only, and says so.15
One participant is not a finding. Naltrexone is unsupported for prolonged grief, and the thing circulating as an ongoing forty-eight-person efficacy trial closed three years ago.
And the question I get asked most
Psychedelics. I work in preparation and integration, so I am asked about this constantly, and I would genuinely like the evidence to be further along than it is.
Someone has now counted it properly. A 2025 scoping review searched seven databases for work on psychedelics and grief after death from advanced illness. It screened 4,614 records. Eighteen reports met criteria. Of those, seven were empirical studies — and not one of them used a randomised controlled design.16
That is the whole evidence base, stated accurately: seven studies, two of them qualitative, none randomised.
What those seven report is genuinely interesting, and it is not nothing. Outcomes were generally positive in terms of grief symptoms, with few adverse events, and the mechanism most often proposed across the papers was that psychedelics facilitate access to — and crucially, acceptance of — emotional material a person had been avoiding.16
Notice that this is the same mechanism as the exposure work above, arriving from a different direction.
The largest single piece of it is a survey, and it is worth taking apart properly. Three hundred and sixty-three people recruited through Mechanical Turk, all bereaved, all of whom had taken a psychedelic afterwards. They rated their grief before and after, from memory. The improvement was large — an effect size of 0.83.18
Then the details the headline leaves out. Eighty-five per cent had taken the substance specifically intending to address their grief, which is about as strong an expectancy effect as you could design. There was no randomisation, no prospective baseline and no untreated comparison group, so selection, expectancy and simple recall can all account for the change. And 57.6 per cent of them took it alone; the remaining 42.4 per cent were in a group.18
Within that sample, two things moved in opposite directions. Where people reported an emotional breakthrough, grief symptoms improved more. Where people reported a challenging experience, they improved less.18
And the scoping review, comparing across studies rather than within one, reports that poorer outcomes — no improvement, or grief that worsened — appeared more often in this survey population than among participants studied in a ceremonial ayahuasca context with psychological support.16
I want to be careful about the join there, because it is exactly where a good argument gets overstated. The survey did not report an alone-versus-group outcome split. What it reported is that challenging experiences tracked with worse grief outcomes, in a sample where most people were by themselves. The cross-study comparison is the reviewers’, not the surveyors’. Put together they point somewhere — but they do not prove it, and I am not going to pretend they do. If you want the longer version of how I read a claim like this, I wrote it up as how to question a wellness claim.
The 42 per cent, and the nine people it came from
There is one number from this field that circulates widely, and it is worth looking at properly, because it is the best thing in the psychedelic grief literature and it is still only nine people.
A psilocybin study in older gay men living with HIV diagnosed before 1996 — men who had survived the AIDS epidemic and lost repeatedly during it — reported a 42 per cent mean reduction in complicated-grief scores one to two weeks afterwards. That figure is real and I can show you where it lives: a nine-row table in the qualitative follow-up paper, reproducing data from the parent trial.19
Now read the nine rows rather than the mean.
| Participant | Grief score at baseline | At weeks 1–2 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 33 | 12 | 64% |
| 2 | 34 | 14 | 59% |
| 3 | 26 | 30 | −15% |
| 4 | 29 | 10 | 64% |
| 5 | 24 | 7 | 71% |
| 6 | 22 | 18 | 20% |
| 7 | 33 | 15 | 55% |
| 8 | 30 | 42 | −40% |
| 9 | 10 | 0 | 100% |
| Mean | 26.8 | 16.4 | 42% |
Two of the nine got worse. Participant 8’s score rose from 30 to 42. And the single largest improvement — the fall of 100 per cent to zero — belonged to a man whose baseline was 10, well below the instrument’s clinical cut-off of 25. He did not have clinically significant complicated grief when he started, and his row does a great deal of work in that average. Two others started at 24 and 22, also below cut-off.19
Three more things the 42 per cent does not carry. There was no control group and no randomisation; the sample was nine men drawn from eighteen enrolled. Complicated grief was a secondary measure — the parent trial’s primary outcome was demoralization. And the measurement point was taken immediately after the fifth group therapy session as well as one to two weeks after the psilocybin session, so the drug and the group cannot be separated at that timepoint.19
Which brings me to the part I did not expect. The authors’ own reading of why it worked is not pharmacological. They conclude that giving group therapy alongside psilocybin may enhance the effectiveness of trauma processing by reinforcing social cohesion, safety, trust and belonging — and their qualitative analysis is about men moving out of emotional avoidance into being able to feel grief and shame they had disowned.19
So the one psilocybin study in this literature with grief numbers attached was a group study, and the people who ran it credit the group.
The protocols, which are plans and not results
There are three feasibility protocols, frequently confused for one another. An open-label pilot in cancer-related bereavement, planning around fifteen participants with a single 25 mg psilocybin session between three preparation and four integration sessions.20 A separate single-arm feasibility study at the University of Virginia; when I checked its registry record on 7 October 2026 it was recruiting, with twelve estimated participants and no results posted.21 And a Barcelona study pairing ayahuasca with meaning-reconstruction therapy, explicitly non-randomised.22,23
None has a control arm, because none is trying to answer the efficacy question yet. A protocol is a plan. It is not a result, and it is certainly not a treatment recommendation.
A targeted search of the literature and the registries on 7 October 2026 did not identify a peer-reviewed randomised trial demonstrating psychedelic efficacy for prolonged grief disorder. That is a dated finding rather than a claim about everything unpublished — but as of today, anyone telling you psilocybin is an evidence-based treatment for grief is ahead of the evidence, and I would want to know what else they are ahead of.
If you are weighing this for yourself, there is a related question most people never think to ask, which is whether your cycle changes how psychedelics affect you.
What I see in my own practice, and why it is the weakest evidence here
I should say where I sit in this, because I am not a neutral reader of it.
My experience might be anecdotal, as I do not have access to a large number of cases yet. From my experience with psychedelics, with proper preparation, clear support, and integration, I have seen clear improvements in the grief process. I also see this in my own coaching practice, with the currently limited number of clients I have.
Once again: this is purely observational, it is in my own practice, so of course it is a biased report. Worth noting: in my practice I do use a compassionate inquiry lens and approach, and we approach grief and similar feelings at the client’s pace.
That is the weakest kind of evidence in this entire article, and I am putting it last on purpose. A practitioner’s impression of her own work is the least reliable instrument in medicine — I see the people who come back, I do not see the people who quietly decided it was not for them, and I have every reason to believe my own method works. None of that makes the observation worthless. It makes it a hypothesis, and the honest place for a hypothesis is beside the trials, clearly labelled, not instead of them.
It is also, for what it is worth, pointing the same direction as everything above: preparation, support, integration, pace. A container, and somebody in it with you.
What I take from the whole set
Three things, and they converge.
Most grief is not this. The trials above concern the minority in whom grief stalls. Reading them as a description of normal bereavement is exactly the error the perception study found people already making.
Where there is good evidence, it is for approach. Revisiting. Turning toward reminders instead of away. Keeping the connection rather than cutting it. That is the architecture of the most-tested protocols, and it is the opposite of waiting for time to do it quietly. The psychedelic literature, for all its thinness, proposes the same mechanism from the other side — access to, and acceptance of, what was being avoided.
And across every strand, what keeps appearing is the container. The therapy trials work through sustained structured attention from another person. The internet trials show the method surviving the loss of the clinic — and up to four in ten people leaving anyway. In the largest psychedelic survey, most people were alone, and a difficult experience tracked with a worse outcome. In the one psilocybin study with grief numbers attached, the therapy was delivered in a group, and the researchers attribute what happened to social cohesion, safety, trust and belonging rather than to the molecule. The philosophical argument says the course of grief is partly constituted by the relational environment it happens in.
Four literatures, four sets of methods, four sets of weaknesses, pointing at the same unglamorous thing.
Not a molecule. Not a protocol. Not a stage. Being accompanied, on purpose, toward what you have been going around.
Which is the sentence I started with, and I did not expect the evidence to hand it back to me.
I have also written this week about what this looks like from the inside rather than from the literature — a conversation that set off a great deal of grief I thought I had finished with. It is the essay, and it is the less useful of the two if you are looking for evidence.
I am a PhD — in medicinal chemistry, not in medicine. I do not diagnose or treat anything. What I can do is read this literature closely and tell you what it says and where it stops, which is what I have done here. Group averages from trials do not determine any individual’s treatment; that conversation belongs with a clinician who knows your history.
Frequently asked questions
How long does grief “normally” last?
There is no normal length, and that is not a dodge. The diagnostic threshold for prolonged grief disorder sits at twelve months post-loss in adults and six months in children and adolescents — but that line is drawn for research and clinical purposes, not as a deadline. It marks the point after which persistent, functionally impairing grief is worth looking at. It does not mean grief should be finished by then.
Does believing in the five stages of grief harm me?
Probably not, on the only evidence that exists. The first instrument built to measure belief in stages found that belief may not be associated with adverse outcomes, and that the most rigid endorsement was negatively associated with prolonged grief, depression and anxiety.2 It is correlational and the sample was narrow, so hold it loosely. Note that this is a different question from whether the stages are accurate — they are not a good description of how grief moves, and that has been clear for decades.
Is prolonged grief disorder just depression?
No. It is a distinct diagnosis with its own criteria, centred on intense yearning and preoccupation with the person who died rather than on pervasive low mood. The 2016 four-arm trial makes the separation unusually clear: in the same study, the same drug improved depressive symptoms while leaving grief response unchanged.12 They can co-occur, and each needs treating on its own terms.
Do I need therapy to grieve?
Almost certainly not. The evidence here concerns a minority in whom grief has stopped moving. The perception research suggests many people in ordinary, functioning grief believe they are doing it wrong, precisely because the public image of grief is modelled on the stuck version.1
What should I look for in a grief therapist?
On this evidence, a structured, time-limited approach willing to go toward the loss — revisiting the death, approaching reminders, and working on restoring ordinary life — rather than one offering only general support. Grief-specific CBT and complicated grief treatment are the packages with randomised evidence behind them.5,6,8,10 Ask directly what the approach involves and what it is based on; a good practitioner will not mind the question. I have written separately on whether a therapist is actually trauma-informed and on what a first session with a somatic practitioner involves.
Can online grief therapy work?
Yes, with a caveat. The 2025 review found internet-delivered CBT producing real effects across several trials, which matters enormously for access.3 It also found dropout as high as 42 per cent. If you take this route, build in something that keeps you turning up.
Should I try psilocybin or ayahuasca for grief?
As of 7 October 2026 there is no randomised trial showing that psychedelics treat prolonged grief disorder. The entire empirical base is seven non-randomised studies.16 In the largest of them, a survey of 363 bereaved people, most participants took the substance alone, and those reporting a challenging experience improved less.18 The most-quoted positive figure — a 42 per cent fall in complicated-grief scores — comes from nine men, two of whom got worse, in a study where psilocybin was given alongside group therapy and the researchers credit the group.19 This is not a recommendation, and nothing in this article is medical advice.
What if I am grieving something that is not a death?
The research here is almost entirely about bereavement, so I will not pretend the findings transfer cleanly. But the underlying description — a long process in which a person updates to an absence — is not specific to death, and neither is the observation that its course is shaped by who is around while it happens.4
If you ever want to look at something properly, with someone: The First Hour — 60 minutes, one to one, online. €35 while I am certifying in Compassionate Inquiry; the rate rises when I qualify. → Book The First Hour
Everything free lives here → rosafbrissos.com/resources
References
- McLean, E.; Singer, J.; Laurita, E.; Kahler, J.; Levin, C.; Papa, A. Perception of Grief Responses: Are Maladaptive Grief Responses and the Stages of Grief Considered Normal? Death Stud. 2022, 46 (6), 1414–1423; online 2021. DOI: 10.1080/07481187.2021.1983890.
- Avis, K. A.; Boelen, P. A.; Schut, H.; Stroebe, M.; Missler, M. Toward the Assessment of Belief in Stages of Grief: Construction and Validation of a Scale. Death Stud. 2026, 1–17. DOI: 10.1080/07481187.2026.2682815.
- Srivastava, T.; Lee, K.; Ehrenkranz, R.; Cozzolino, P. J.; Wise, F. A.; Burns, M.; McCormick, T.; Yaden, D.; Agrawal, M.; Penberthy, J. K. The Efficacy of Psychotherapeutic Interventions for Prolonged Grief Disorder: A Systematic Review. J. Affect. Disord. 2025, 380, 561–575. DOI: 10.1016/j.jad.2025.03.173.
- Ratcliffe, M.; Fernandez Velasco, P. The Nature of Grief: Implications for the Neurobiology of Emotion. Neurosci. Conscious. 2024, 2024 (1), niae041. DOI: 10.1093/nc/niae041.
- Shear, K.; Frank, E.; Houck, P. R.; Reynolds, C. F. Treatment of Complicated Grief: A Randomized Controlled Trial. JAMA 2005, 293 (21), 2601–2608. DOI: 10.1001/jama.293.21.2601.
- Shear, M. K.; Wang, Y.; Skritskaya, N.; Duan, N.; Mauro, C.; Ghesquiere, A. Treatment of Complicated Grief in Elderly Persons: A Randomized Clinical Trial. JAMA Psychiatry 2014, 71 (11), 1287–1295. DOI: 10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2014.1242.
- Iglewicz, A.; Shear, M. K.; Reynolds, C. F.; Simon, N.; Lebowitz, B.; Zisook, S. Complicated Grief Therapy for Clinicians: An Evidence-Based Protocol for Mental Health Practice. Depress. Anxiety 2020, 37 (1), 90–98; online 2019. DOI: 10.1002/da.22965.
- Bryant, R. A.; Azevedo, S.; Yadav, S.; Cahill, C.; Kenny, L.; Maccallum, F.; Dawson, K.; Tran, J.; Rawson, N.; Tockar, J.; Garber, B.; Keyan, D.; Harvey, S.; Lenferink, L.; Jones, N. Cognitive Behavior Therapy vs Mindfulness in Treatment of Prolonged Grief Disorder: A Randomized Clinical Trial. JAMA Psychiatry 2024, 81 (7), 646–654. DOI: 10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2024.0432.
- Bryant, R. A.; Kenny, L.; Joscelyne, A.; Rawson, N.; Maccallum, F.; Cahill, C.; Hopwood, S.; Aderka, I.; Nickerson, A. Treating Prolonged Grief Disorder: A Randomized Clinical Trial. JAMA Psychiatry 2014, 71 (12), 1332–1339. DOI: 10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2014.1600.
- Rosner, R.; Comtesse, H.; Vogel, A.; Doering, B. K.; Geiser, F.; Kersting, A.; Rief, W.; Wagner, B. Grief-Specific Cognitive Behavioral Therapy vs Present-Centered Therapy: A Randomized Clinical Trial. JAMA Psychiatry 2025, 82; online 2024. DOI: 10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2024.3409.
- Boelen, P. A.; Lenferink, L. I. M.; Spuij, M. CBT for Prolonged Grief in Children and Adolescents: A Randomized Clinical Trial. Am. J. Psychiatry 2021, 178 (4), 294–304. DOI: 10.1176/appi.ajp.2020.20050548.
- Shear, M. K.; Reynolds, C. F.; Simon, N. M.; Zisook, S.; Wang, Y.; Mauro, C.; Duan, N.; Lebowitz, B.; Skritskaya, N. Optimizing Treatment of Complicated Grief: A Randomized Clinical Trial. JAMA Psychiatry 2016, 73 (7), 685–694. DOI: 10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2016.0892.
- American Psychiatric Association. Prolonged Grief Disorder. psychiatry.org (accessed 2026-10-07).
- Gang, J.; Kocsis, J.; Avery, J.; Maciejewski, P. K.; Prigerson, H. G. Naltrexone Treatment for Prolonged Grief Disorder: Study Protocol for a Randomized, Triple-Blinded, Placebo-Controlled Trial. Trials 2021, 22, 110. DOI: 10.1186/s13063-021-05044-8.
- ClinicalTrials.gov. Naltrexone Treatment for Prolonged Grief Disorder, NCT04547985. Study details and posted results (accessed 2026-10-07).
- Rosenbaum, D.; Carter, C.; Cirella, B. A.; Cho, M.; Anderson, M.; Hales, S. The Use of Psychedelics for Grief Following Death Due to Advanced Illness: A Scoping Review. OMEGA — J. Death Dying 2025, advance online publication. DOI: 10.1177/00302228251359366.
- Ehrenkranz, R.; Agrawal, M.; Penberthy, J. K.; Yaden, D. B. Narrative Review of the Potential for Psychedelics to Treat Prolonged Grief Disorder. Int. Rev. Psychiatry 2024, 36 (8), 879–890. DOI: 10.1080/09540261.2024.2357668.
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- Agin-Liebes, G.; Ekman, E.; Anderson, B.; Malloy, M.; Haas, A.; Woolley, J. Participant Reports of Mindfulness, Posttraumatic Growth, and Social Connectedness in Psilocybin-Assisted Group Therapy: An Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis. J. Humanistic Psychol. 2021, 1–28; print 64 (4), 564–591. DOI: 10.1177/00221678211022949. Complicated-grief and PTSD scores are reproduced in Table 2 of this paper; they originate in the parent trial reported by Anderson et al., 2020, which was not independently examined for this article.
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