Dr. Betty Murray argues that psychiatric manuals wrongly exclude pet-loss grief, even though the evidence shows it's real and significant. Dogs and cats live 10-20 years, so owners will inevitably face this loss. Current clinical categories invalidate what pet owners actually experience.
And here's the part that makes me hangry on behalf of every person who's apologized for crying too hard over a dog or a cat. The official diagnosis manuals, the ones psychiatrists actually use to label, don't allow for that diagnosis to apply to a pet loss at all. Not because the evidence doesn't support it and says it shouldn't. It's because of how the category was written. So we build an entire clinical framework that tells people their grief doesn't officially count Well, the data underneath it says the opposite. So if you're a pet owner, if you haven't had a pet loss, you will have a pet loss. One of the most beautiful and painful things of owning pets and having pets or being allowed to have them in your life is they don't have the same lifespan as us, other than birds, right? But the reality is, is inviting a dog or a cat into your life means you have somewhere between on average 10 to 20 years to spend with them and they will pass. Before you do.
