On the Health Consequences of Bereavement

The death of a spouse and, perhaps even more, the death of a child have been widely viewed as the most stressful of all human experiences. The belief that such stresses have adverse effects on health is so embedded in folklore that the relative lack of scientific support for such a belief has often been overlooked.In fact, bereavement offers an unusually good opportunity to study a stressful life event in terms of its consequences for health. By nature, bereavement lends itself to the rigorous experimental design of long-term, prospective, epidemiologic studies. Furthermore, the grief reaction has been the subject . . .