Arthur Brooks

15 million Americans.

That's extraordinary.

That's 5% of the population.

You look right, you look left, one in 20 people is freshly...

grieving which shows how ubiquitous it is and yet it feels so it feels so strange and it feels so unusual and people feel so uniquely unfortunate when it actually happens even though it's almost the most normal thing that we could expect when we talk about prolonged grief which is lasting where the the ill effects are lasting psychologically lasting more than a year that afflicts about one in ten bereaved people where the mourner's suffering really remains high over an extended period

Now, why am I talking about it?

Because when we talk about it, the research can give us a tremendous amount of value in understanding what it is

why it happens, how it's normal, and how to deal with it.

And that's my goal here.

Let's distinguish between a couple of different things.

Bereavement and grief are not the same thing.

Bereavement is the experience of loss.

There's the experience of losing somebody that you love, for example, a parent dying, God forbid, a child dying.

Grief is the physiological or psychological or social response to that experience.

So you see how this works.

It's like you experience the loss and then you have an experience subsequent to that loss.

What do you do?

The response to that experience, that's what grief actually is.

There have been some pretty famous studies on this that probably you have heard of.

The most