Traumatic and complicated grief?

A recent article from Duarte et al. focused on the assessment of child mental health problems related to exposure to violence. The authors also referred to the process of grief among children and to its potential to trigger abnormal reac-tions, or psychopathology1. Relating to the top-ic, the article lacks consistency, what deserves to be pointed out. The authors mentioned (1st paragraph of sec-tion “Traumatic grief: new diagnostic category?”) that “traumatic grief…is often confused with complicated grief”, leaving one to understand that they are both separate categories. Moreover, by considering “complicated grief ” as “another newly developing diagnosis ” (same sentence), the arti-cle warrants confusion to escalate. Since the work of Lindemann2, authors have variously, interchangeably referred to traumatic grief, complicated grief or pathologic grief as to mean the same concept: a pattern of abnormal, non-adaptive grieving reaction which is associ-ated with present distress or disability. Litera-ture fully supports that traumatic (or compli-cated or pathologic) grief can follow any kind of death, including the ones by a chronic long-lasting disease of a loved one. Conversely, trau-matic death can have anteceded a plea of reac-tions among survivors, since from the most adaptive to the (probably pathologic) less adap-tive ones3-10. Such less adaptive processes of Joao Paulo Consentino Solano 1 mourning are associated with some risk factors, being traumatic death one of them11. Part of the alluded confusion may be attributable to that, and another part is probably due to an under-standable linguistic association – the one between “traumatic death ” and “traumatic grief”. Having agreed that “traumatic death ” must be disentangled from “traumatic grief”, one is expected to step forward to consider, as to say, “abnormal grief reactions ” as a new diagnosti