Pathological grief: an intensive case study

Pathological mourning is such an excessive, blocked, or distorted process that psychiatric signs and symptoms develop. Explanation of how and why these signs and symptoms form could deepen an understanding of both normal and pathological mourning. Because many variables are involved in such explanations, intensive case study is a desirable methodology because it permits a detailed look at how various factors interact (Brewer and Hunter 1989; Luborsky and Mintz 1972; Luborsky and Spence 1971; Nessleroade and Ford 1985). While a patient may complain of symptoms as experiences that endure or occur episodically over days and weeks, a clinician observes psychiatric signs in the here-and-now seconds and minutes of an interview. Relating signs and symptoms to each other and to other variables in order to form a theoretical model of their formation requires exploration of data across long and short time frames. It is important to understand how the here-and-now phenomena combine to form patterns across longer periods of the individual's life. Hence, we developed a combined macro- and microanalytic approach to intensive case studies.