Grieving children
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When a parent dies suddenly, a child quite naturally is bereft and grieving. For some children, though, the grief process continues longer than for other children. At the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Dr. Nadine Melhem looked at data on families in which a parent died between July 2002 and January 2007. She says close to 60 percent of the young people could cope with their grief within one year. But she says grieving was more complicated for some others: "Thirty percent showed a more gradual decrease of their grief symptoms. And 10 percent had high and prolonged grief even three years after their parents died." (10 seconds) The study in Archives of General Psychiatry was supported by the National Institutes of Health.