Treatment

Your doctor or mental health professional considers your particular symptoms and circumstances in determining what treatment is likely to work best for you.

Psychotherapy

Complicated grief is often treated with a type of psychotherapy called complicated grief therapy. It's similar to psychotherapy techniques used for depression and PTSD, but it's specifically for complicated grief. This treatment can be effective when done individually or in a group format.

During therapy, you may:

• Learn about complicated grief and how it's treated
• Explore such topics as grief reactions, complicated grief symptoms, adjusting to your loss and redefining your life goals
• Hold imagined conversations with your loved one and retell the circumstances of the death to help you become less distressed by images and thoughts of your loved one
• Explore and process thoughts and emotions
• Improve coping skills
• Reduce feelings of blame and guilt

Other types of psychotherapy can help you address other mental health conditions, such as depression or PTSD, which can occur along with complicated grief.

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.