Diagnostic Tools for Identifying Prolonged Grief: Development and Validation of the First Clinical Diagnostic Interview for Assessing Prolonged Grief Disorder With the ICD 11 Criteria and DSM-5 Tr Criteria.

Development and validation of first clinical diagnostic interview for assessing Prolonged Grief Disorder (PGD) with the ICD 11 and DSM 5 Tr criteria.

Background: With WHO's introduction of PGD in the ICD 11, which will be implemented in Health Services worldwide from January 2022, there is a need to accurately diagnose people with ICD-11PGD (PGD caseness) with a valid structured clinical interview.

With ICD-11 a slightly different set of symptoms for PGD is defined as the gold standard for PGD. This standard will be used for diagnosing and understanding PGD in future research and health service. ICD-11 aims to be descriptive, e.g. provides a support for the clinicians to identify PGD by describing common reactions and symptoms of this disorder, but there is still a need to evaluate the validity of these criteria. Strict diagnostic criteria with defined numbers, combinations, and intensity of symptoms (e.g. for the use in research) are not yet defined in ICD-11 and no structured clinical interview that measure ICD-11 or the upcoming DSM 5 tr PGD has yet been developed and validated for this purpose. This means that the field currently stand without reliable ways to classify accurately who has PGD diagnosis and who has not. Without such constructs, PGD is not possible to identify, and ultimately to treat, in a validated and reliable way.

There is therefore a need to develop accurate tests that measure ICD 11 PGD, both in a structured clinical interview for use in direct meetings between patients and health service professionals and in relation to a self-report scale. The investigators already developed the Aarhus PGD scale but still need a structured clinical interview.

Aim: In this project we will