The concept of traumatic grief was once maintained by Prigerson in the late 1990s to be soon replaced by various concepts such as persistent grief or complicated grief, to cause a confusion of diagnostic criteria, the common element across those concepts being the psychological disturbance caused by the loss of a beloved one. Most contemporary psychotherapy for complicated grief put an emphasis upon the cognitive restructure of the meaning of the loss reflecting the prevailing understanding that the basis of the pathogenesis of the disorder is the loss of attachment and that the intrusion symptom is actually the yearning for the deceased. In those cases, however, where the loss of attachment is complicated by the comorbid symptoms of PTSD, caused by the death due to accident or murder, contradictory psychological processes are generated by the desire to forget the traumatic nature of the event but to maintain the vivid image of the deceased. The trauma-focused treatment is often necessary for those cases and the concept of traumatic grief, grief caused by trauma, would be clinically beneficial and should be further verified through clinical practice and research.
 <Author's abstract>