Grief over the death of a pet can be as chronic as that for a family member, new research suggests. A study published in PLOS One found that people who lose a beloved animal can suffer from prolonged grief disorder (PGD), a mental health condition previously thought to only apply to human losses.
Researchers surveyed 975 adults in the UK and discovered that 7.5% of pet owners who had lost an animal met the diagnostic criteria for PGD. This rate is comparable to the proportion who experience the condition after the death of a close friend (7.5%), a grandparent (8.3%), a sibling (8.9%), or a partner (9.1%). Only the loss of a parent (11.2%) or a child (21.3%) resulted in significantly higher rates.
Professor Philip Hyland of Maynooth University, who led the study, said the symptoms of severe grief for a pet “matched identically” with those for a human, and there was “no difference in how people experienced those losses”. He called for diagnostic guidelines for PGD to be expanded to include pet loss, as current criteria only cover the death of a person.
Around one in five people who had experienced both a pet and a human death said the loss of their pet was worse. The study estimated that one in 12 cases of PGD in the UK stem from pet bereavement, largely because about half of adults own pets and their lifespans are shorter than humans’. Hyland described the exclusion of pets from PGD criteria as “scientifically misguided” and “callous”.
