Depression after death of grandparent

If you bottle up your emotions, your grief will spill out later as severe depression, according to Freud and a host of more recent authors on coping with death. Now comes a study, however, that finds people who dwell excessively on negative emotions aroused by their loss are also at high risk for long-term depressions. On the other hand, people who are already recovered from a grief-related depression within a month following their loss do not tend to lapse into depression months later. In their study of San Francisco Bay Area residents who had lost a loved one to cancer, Stanford University psychologist Susan Nolen- Hoeksema and two colleagues found the process of healthy grieving is more complicated than simply expressing your negative emotions. Most people show significant recovery from a grief-related depression within six months, but people who are still very depressed after six months are at high risk for remaining depressed for a very long time after that. Those include the social relationships people have, the number of stresses in their lives, their general disposition toward optimism or pessimism, and their methods for coping with negative emotions or stress, such as the feelings of sadness and emptiness that often accompany the death of a loved one. Some were connected to the loved one's illness.