Traumatic Grief: Diagnosis, Treatment, and Prevention

From our regular book review column.

By uncanny coincidence, on the eve of my planned reading of Selby Jacobs’ monograph Traumatic Grief: Diagnosis, Treatment, and Prevention, I was called to do a consultation with a young man whose wife and young child had been suddenly and violently killed the previous evening by an out-of-control car. As a result, my reading of this dense brief for the acceptance of this new diagnostic entity was spurred by an urgency to find backing for my clinical judgment from research and someone more experienced in dealing with a situation I have rarely seen.