> We medicalize grief because we fear it. I think this is just incorrect. You are not obligated to seek treatment for most medical problems[1]. The point of medicalizing something is to draw a line between situations where it would be too soon for medical professionals to step in and when people enter a situation where they may need external help. One of the diagnostic criteria, which this article mentions, is that y…
I think you are misinterpreting what the author means with "medicalize". They aren't saying "require to be treated by a medical professional". What they're saying is that as a culture, we reason about grief using the tools and concepts of the medical industry. Because it's part of our culture, this is so automatic that it's almost hard to conceive of any other way. But it is indeed a choice to describe grief as a sor…
That said, if that's what the author was trying to talk about, I think they are doing so in a way that unfairly indicts the medical system for assertions it doesn't make. They say "Apparently, that’s a disease", but as I said I do not think it is. I think they've misunderstood what makes a disease under the diagnostic criteria they list.
> We could just as well have a culture that treats grief as a normal part of the human experience.
That culture does exist. Even in this article there is an experience of grief that's considered normative in the medical community. Including, I would argue, the authors' grief. I would argue that the medical approach to grief is actually better than other western treatments of grief.
I agree that western cultures (and US culture in particular) is horrible about grief. We want people to be robotic and predictable and not make us think about loss and be sad in private and a whole mess of awful, inhuman things. But I don't think that pressure either comes from the medical community or is furthered by how the medical community talks about grief.