[Prolonged grief disorder: towards a new diagnostic category]

The grief in response to loss of a significant is a normal, inevitable, experience of life. Nevertheless some people, even after a couple of months, do not succeed in integrating this experience in their daily life and remain stuck in a state of suffering condition that seriously extended in the time is functionally impairing. For long time psychology has focused on bereavement subsequent to the loss and the complications that can derive from the missing elaboration. The condition of prolonged grief has been object of a large debate in the past years, up to the individualization of a specific set of symptoms identified in a new diagnostic category: the Prolonged Grief Disorder (PGD). The PGD is featured as a condition of emotional distress and physical distress by the loss, not for the death, of a significant only, with daily involvement in all function areas. Our work given a short and non exhaustive overview of the cultural and scientific run that has brought to the collection of the evidences to insert the PGD as new diagnostic category in the DSM V and a comparison between the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and the Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) for better underlining similes, but above all differences among categories that subtend clinical conditions that can appear sometimes overlaps.