Promoting Resilience When Illness and Death Disrupt Life Trajectories: An Interactive Workshop

Abstract: The experience of loss and grief is nearly ubiquitous across medical settings. Patients with serious illness face loss of their physical health and potentially, the loss of their identity, abilities, and even life itself. In bereavement, their grieving family members face their own heightened risk for serious health disorders. Even when death is not imminent, both patients and their family grieve the loss of a future once imagined for themselves. Yet, humans possess tremendous capacity to adapt to serious illness and changing circumstances. Resilience is the most common response to acquired severe physical injury, natural disaster, and bereavement. Importantly, there is substantial evidence that early cultivation of resilience facilitates healthy adaptation to illness.

The practice of consultation-liaison (CL) psychiatry entails care for patients and their families at a time when their life circumstances tragically change. Yet many CL clinicians do not receive in-depth training on grief and bereavement. The 2021 inclusion of prolonged grief disorder (PGD) in the DSM-5-TR heightens the need to understand how to evaluate and manage grief disorders in the medical setting.¹ Enhancing our ability to support patients and families coping with grief and loss can help them reimagine their life trajectories.

In this interactive workshop, the presenters will draw from years of clinical care and research experience with bereaved family members and individuals with life-limiting illnesses to provide a framework for understanding grief disorders and teach practical strategies to engage patients, our colleagues, and ourselves in these discussions. To facilitate participant engagement, the presenters will integrate audience participation in the form of question and answers, interactive exercises, reflective practice, and discussion with our fellow clinicians who engage in this work.

Dr. Park will provide an overview of grief disorders – addressing concepts such as anticipatory grief, ambiguous grief, and differentiation of grief from depressive disorders. She will also facilitate discussion about the controversies of designating PGD as a diagnostic entity.

Dr. Yopp will present the Dual Process Model of Bereavement- a framework for conceptualizing adaptation and loss. He will provide recommendations on how clinicians can utilize this model to engage patients and families in these discussions and what we can learn from the bereaved.

Dr. Stewart will discuss evidence-based psychosocial interventions that promote adaptive coping with grief. She will provide guidance on how clinicians can incorporate these techniques at the bedside with patients and families.

Dr. Rosenstein will address how CL clinicians can foster healthy adaptation to loss in patients, our colleagues, and institutions that lead to improved coping and posttraumatic growth.



1. Prigerson HG, et al. Validation of the new DSM‐5‐TR criteria for prolonged grief disorder and the PG‐13‐Revised (PG‐13‐R) scale. World Psychiatry. 2021;20(1):96-106.