TY  - JOUR
A1  - Steil, Regina
A1  - Gutermann, Jana
A1  - Harrison, Octavia
A1  - Starck, Annabelle
A1  - Schwartzkopff, Laura
A1  - Schouler-Ocak, Meryam
A1  - Stangier, Ulrich
T1  - Prevalence of prolonged grief disorder in a sample of female refugees
T2  - BMC psychiatry
N2  - Background: Prolonged Grief Disorder (PGD) is a distinct syndrome that follows bereavement. It is different from other mental disorders and is characterized by symptoms such as yearning for the bereaved, or intense emotional pain or distress. Violent loss is one major risk factor for the development of PGD.
Objectives: PGD has been studied in different populations, mostly in small samples, with only a few of them being representative. Although research highlighted that traumatic experiences paired with challenges related to migration make refugees particularly vulnerable to PGD, PGD has only rarely been studied in refugees. Thus, this article a) examines the prevalence of PGD in female refugees in Germany according to the criteria proposed by Prigerson and colleagues in 2009, and b) associates PGD with other common psychopathology (e.g. anxiety, depression, somatization and trauma).
Method: A total of 106 female refugees were assessed for bereavement and PGD. Of these 106 individuals, 85 were interviewed using the Prolonged Grief Disorder Scale (PG-13). Symptoms of anxiety and depression were assessed by the Hopkins Symptom Checklist-25 (HSCL-25), somatization was assessed by the Somatization Subscale of the Symptom-Checklist-90 (SCL-90), and the number of witnessed and experienced trauma was assessed by the Posttraumatic Diagnostic Scale (PDS/HTQ).
Results: Ninety of the 106 participants had experienced bereavement, and among those, 9.41% met criteria for PGD. The most frequent PGD symptoms were bitterness, longing or yearning for the bereaved, and lack of acceptance of the loss. Furthermore, grief symptoms were significantly associated with symptoms of depression, anxiety, somatization, and the number of experienced traumatic events.
Conclusion: The PGD prevalence rate found corresponds with previous studies, demonstrating that prevalence rates for PGD are especially high in refugees. High prevalence rates of bereavement as well as PGD highlight the need for assessment and specifically tailored treatment of PGD in refugees. PGD goes along with significant psychopathology, which further emphasizes the need for treatment.
KW  - Refugees
KW  - Asylum seekers
KW  - Prolonged grief disorder
KW  - Prevalence
Y1  - 2019
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/50330
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-503306
SN  - 1471-244X
N1  - Open Access: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
VL  - 19
IS  - 1, Art. 148
SP  - 1
EP  - 10
PB  - BioMed Central ; Springer
CY  - London ; Berlin ; Heidelberg
ER  -