Editorial: Grief in Children: Phenomenology and Beyond

Abstract

Millions of children throughout the world are exposed to adversity including war and mass trauma resulting in parental death and the death of loved ones. Childhood parental death has a negative impact on children's mental health, results in complicated or prolonged grief reactions in a subset of children, and affects overall functioning, reducing children's potential for normative development.^1-4 We thank Geronazzo-Alman et al.⁵ for their important contribution in this issue, in which they have demonstrated the distinctiveness of grief reactions from major depressive disorder (MDD) and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms in a large representative sample of youth exposed to a unique mass trauma (9/11, the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States).