Examining Prolonged Grief Disorder and Its Relationship to Self-Directed Violence Among Veterans

The primary research question in this study will ask, among those receiving outpatient mental health services (MHS) at the Eastern Colorado Healthcare System (ECHCS)/Denver Veterans Affairs Medical Center (VAMC), how many suffer from Prolonged Grief Disorder (PGD)? Here, it is hypothesized that PGD will occur within the sample. A secondary aim of this study will be to investigate how often PGD co-occurs with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and/or depression. Also, while PGD has been shown to have an effect on self-directed violence (SDV) among civilians (Prigerson, Bridge et al., 1999), no studies yet have examined the relationship between PGD and SDV among Veterans. Therefore, it also is hypothesized that as PGD severity increases among the Veteran sample, risk for SDV will increase as well. Additional research aims also will be addressed in this study. For one, it will be assessed which grief symptoms are most often reported among the Veteran sample. Also, no study has yet to examine if there are neuropsychological differences between PGD and PTSD. Therefore, another research question here is whether PGD indeed is neuropsychologically different from PTSD. Here, the exploratory hypothesis is that PGD sufferers will respond to a measure of multiple components of cognition (e.g., planning, sequencing, concentration, multitasking, and memory efficiency) in a manner that is significantly different from PTSD sufferers.