Grief & Mourning: The "Lost" Cause

A child is "just a little too much to handle" at school: harming other children, refusing to calm down, throwing temper tantrums and even damaging school property, and his mother decides he needs 'counseling'. She takes him either to a local counselor or pastor, who listens, integrates, advises, etc, but the child does not seem to get any better, and in fact, close to the time of going to 'talk' may become even worse. The parents are exasperated, the child is 'vexed' and the teacher doesn't know if the child can continue much longer in that condition in the classroom setting. This sort of scenario goes on across the country, on a somewhat regular basis, and often parents turn to psychological diagnosis and even hospitalization in extreme cases, or possibly to 'pharmaceutical' solutions, which may 'quiet' the child and leave him more manageable, but the minute the psychotropic is removed, the behavior returns. .

Loss in the Family

Loss is an insidious process, particularly in the very young.(See Grief & Children). In one study we conducted back in the '80s, we looked at 'diagnoses' of children in a Children's Psychiatric Center at a Children's Hospital in Akron to see if there was any vague relationship of certain kind of 'diagnoses' {patterns of problems} with loss in the family, particularly of infant loss. While the study was only a first step, we did indeed find that at least two patterns of problems were at least 'correlated' with an infant loss occuring within usually a year prior to the 'onset' of the problem.

I do not any longer speak a great deal 'clinically' for I have found it is not always helpful. When families came into the Center, they were asked about family histories of perinatal loss along with other traditional intake questions. In a preliminary study, we found that two categories at least appeared to associated with former losses, often a year or more past the loss: problems related to sexual abuse, and what is called by psychologists ADD, or 'Attention Deficit Disorder'. I have somewhat of a bias now as a Christian to favor more practical explanations of childhood behavior after a loss than I had then, and it must be noted that some 'categories' of diagnoses have become 'garbage' categories, meaning that when a number of vague traits or characteristics are present, but not all, and not exactly, or when no 'cause' can be determined, then the behavioral presentation of the child are often lumped into certain categories. Now, most psychologists will never admit to this openly, but a few diagnostic categories really do lend to more subjective groupings, and ADD is one. Another is a classification called 'minimal brain dysfunction', or in psychiatric hospitals when all else fails, a person may be described as 'schizo-affective' and in the past 20 years, even the meaning of 'bipolar' has greyed and broadened that many presentations are lumped into that category. This discussion though is for another time, suffice it to say, that at least generally, the two diagnoses showed a preponderance of previously reported perinatal losses: stillbirth, miscarriage and neo-natal and SIDS deaths.

While the study was not replicated later across centers, still the preponderance did appear to be significant (Best & Van Devere 1987 ) and at the time I began to muse at why it would be those categories and not others, for in the beginning i expected there would be a 'causal' or contributory factor of loss, but I did not predict the pattern. After some thought, (still pending more research) I realized there were at least some logical suppositions: for many couples, after a loss, there are often intimacy problems, moreso than with just regular losses, because the event of the death is so immediately tied to procreation, and intimacy associated with the engendering of the birth of another infant. It is at least explanatory, that as intimacy in a marriage is suspended, a child in the family with less of an association with the loss might become a target for misplaced and perverse affection. In this light, the association would be tenable. The fact that ADD or other Juvenile Delinquency type behaviors would display following a perinatal loss in the family or any loss, is readily understandable as the manifestation of childhood grief in agitation, delinquency -like patterns and what others call 'acting out' is easily comprehensible as the child seeks to work out difficult feelings in less mature ways than an adult with more emotional resources.

The Long Lost Cause

What must be addressed in many 'diagnoses' or 'presenting problems' in 'mental health issues' is that while the psychological community may meet each series of 'symptoms' like a medical disease or psychological complex, the real reason for the painful emotional condition and troublesome behavior may really trace back, and often does to a loss of some sort, and that perinatal losses are often ignored Back to Home

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