I now see that some clients truly need relief from the intensity of their feelings of loss. Today's antidepressants, anti-anxiety and sleep medications are more effective. They can be useful for taking the edge off, when prescribed in the right doses by a psychiatrist.
Medications. There's little solid research on the use of psychiatric medications to treat complicated grief. However, antidepressants may be helpful in people who have clinical depression as well as complicated grief.
Common medications used in grief treatment regimens include antidepressants, anti-anxiety meds and medications to promote sleep.
Writing down your thoughts
Writing down some of the reasons you're feeling anxious can help you organise your thoughts and make them feel less overwhelming. Journaling and letter writing are also proven tools to help you cope with grief.
As a general rule, normal grief does not warrant the use of antidepressants (/articles/ depression/antidepressant-medication. htm). While medication may relieve some of the symptoms of grief, it cannot treat the cause, which is the loss itself.
Emotional pain of any loss can be intense. Whether we try to deal with this pain by hiding our feelings or by taking anti-depressants to make them less intense, it still does nothing to process them. At the end of the day, the pain of grief will still be there.
Antidepressants can make you feel worse at first
Starting an antidepressant can't actually make your depression worse. But it can cause side effects that are very similar to depression. Antidepressants can make you feel tired, cause concentration problems, and lead to changes in sleep and appetite.
Thanatophobia is an extreme fear of death or the dying process. You might be scared of your own death or the death of a loved one.
Grief, which is the series of emotions that accompany a significant loss, can drop you to your knees. That feeds anxiety. Grieving people can begin feeling anxious about their own health or the safety of other loved ones.
These are some of the physical symptoms of grief that you may experience: a hollow feeling in your stomach. tightness, or heaviness, in your chest or throat. oversensitivity to noise.
Unresolved grief, or complex grief, is different from normal grief in various ways. First, it lasts much longer, at times for many years. Second, it's much more severe and intense, not lessening with time but instead often worsening. Third, it interferes with a person's ability to function normally in daily life.
For a diagnosis of prolonged grief disorder, the loss of a loved one had to have occurred at least a year ago for adults, and at least 6 months ago for children and adolescents.
Important signs that grief is winding down therefore include the slow return of the ability to feel pleasure and joy again, the return of a present or future-facing orientation (e.g., looking forward to things in the future again), and the return of desire for reaching out to others and re-engaging in life.
Grieving isn't just an emotional process. It can be surprisingly physical too, leaving you exhausted, achy, restless and even with cold or flu-like symptoms. Your mind and body are run down and burnt out, and you might feel that way for weeks or even months.
The pain is caused by the overwhelming amount of stress hormones being released during the grieving process. These effectively stun the muscles they contact. Stress hormones act on the body in a similar way to broken heart syndrome. Aches and pains from grief should be temporary.
Grief can surface and resurface in unexpected ways. You can be feeling relatively fine and then a little sign can trigger a memory that causes an extreme sense of panic and anxiety.
Fearing death also makes it harder for us to process grief. A recent study found that those who were afraid of death were more likely to have prolonged symptoms of grief after losing a loved one compared to those who had accepted death.
Reasons why a griever might have difficulty sleeping after a death include: Ruminating about intrusive thoughts. Worries and anxieties about stressors that have occurred as a result of the death. Bad dreams, or anxiety about having bad dreams.
Nearly half of patients on all types of monoaminergic antidepressants report emotional blunting,6 and it is associated with serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) therapy as follows: among 161 patients, 46% reported a narrowed range of affect, 21% reported an inability to cry, and 19% reported apathy.
On antidepressant medication, it is possible that you might experience a sense of feeling numb and less like yourself. Though the symptoms of depression have decreased, there may be a sense that other emotional responses – laughing or crying, for example – are more difficult to experience.
There is new reason to be cautious about using popular antidepressants in people who are not really depressed. For the first time, research has shown that a widely used antidepressant may cause subtle changes in brain structure and function when taken by those who are not depressed.