Chronic Sorrow Article ...

I'm too productive to claim to be seriously depressed, and I can feel happy or amused at times, but life just seems wrong. 

Susan Roos, PhD

Chronic Sorrow: A Living Loss 

Hi everyone! I'm pleased to say that the Winter issue of BC's Insights into Clinical Counselling held my first full-length article on Chronic Sorrow, Unending Loss: An Introduction to Chronic Sorrow in Family Caregivers. The emails and phone calls I've received in response to this article have underlined the potency of the information and and the need of family caregivers everywhere to have their unique experience acknowledged and understood.

The article begins:

Introduction

I wish I had known in 1997 the things I know today about chronic sorrow (CS), a distinct, common, but little known grief response affecting people with chronic conditions and those who love them.

Late in the fall of 1997, following a hike in the North Shore mountains, my previously healthy husband developed a life-threatening heart rhythm, the first sign of what would become a seven year journey with heart failure. During those seven years, I coped with many stressors including feedback from family and friends regarding my "depression". Wasn't I over his diagnosis yet? Hadn't it been several years? Why was I still crying? Perhaps I should see the doctor for antidepressants?

Part of me pondered the same questions but another part insisted that I was not depressed. I was too focused and functional to be depressed and my periods of intense sadness, while many, were interspersed with times of genuine happiness, pleasure and gratitude. So, if not depression, what was I experiencing?

It was not until the year after my husband's death that a workshop comment by grief expert, Robert Neimeyer, PhD, led me to the writings of American psychologist Susan Roos, PhD, and through her work, to the Nursing Consortium for Research on Chronic Sorrow (NCRCS). There, I discovered ...