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By Daniella Gray
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For most people, the pain of losing a loved one gradually lessens over time. But for others, however, that healing never comes.
Instead, grief stays raw, consuming and unrelenting—a condition known as prolonged grief disorder (PGD).
In a review published in the journal Trends in Neurosciences, researchers examine what is currently known about the brain mechanisms behind PGD, offering insight into why some people remain “stuck” in grief long after a loss—and how the condition differs from depression and anxiety.
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“Prolonged grief disorder is the new kid on the block in terms of psychiatric diagnoses,” said lead author Richard Bryant, a trauma researcher at the University of New South Wales in Australia. While grief itself has been studied for decades, PGD was only formally recognized as a diagnosis in 2018.
The core experience of PGD closely resembles typical grief. People feel intense yearning, longing and emotional pain after losing someone close to them. The difference is that for around one in every 20 bereaved individuals, those feelings persist beyond six months and do not ease with time.
People with PGD may feel that life has lost its meaning, that part of their identity has disappeared or that they are unable to fully accept the death—even though they know it has occurred.
“It’s not that it’s a different type of grief,” said Bryant. “It’s just more that the person is stuck in the grief."
To better understand why that happens, Bryant and his colleagues reviewed research on the neurobiology of prolonged grief—an area still in its early stages.
Much of the existing evidence comes from neuroimaging studies, in which bereaved participants recall memories of the deceased or view reminders of them while undergoing brain scans.
Across these studies, PGD has repeatedly been linked to disruptions in reward-related brain networks. These include the nucleus accumbens and orbitofrontal cortex, which are involved in desire and motivation, as well as the amygdala and insula, which play key roles in emotion processing.
“It sort of gelled with this notion that grief is characterized by a craving or a longing for the deceased,” Bryant added.
That craving appears to be more than metaphorical. The brain activity seen in people with PGD suggests that reminders of the lost loved one continue to activate reward circuits, rather than gradually fading as they do in people whose grief eases over time.
Some of these neural patterns are not unique to prolonged grief. Similar changes have been observed in depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, which also involve rumination and emotional distress. Given that overlap, Bryant said, it would be surprising if there were no similarities.
The challenge now, he added, is determining which brain changes are specific to PGD and whether they cause prolonged grief or result from it. Future studies following larger groups of bereaved people over time may help answer those questions.
Newsweek reached out to the researchers of the study for comment via email.
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Reference
Bryant, R. A., Breukelaar, I. A., & Korgaonkar, M. (2026). A neurobiological perspective on prolonged grief disorder. Trends in Neurosciences. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tins.2026.01.001
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