The Other Side of Sadness: What the New Science of Bereavement Tells Us About Life After Loss
by George A. Bonanno · Basic Books
George Bonanno draws on his longitudinal studies of bereaved people to show that resilience is the most common response to loss. He covers the different grief trajectories, how sadness and laughter work, and why the stage model misdescribes most people's grief.
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More resources on Grief & Bereavement
A Grief Observed
C.S. Lewis's short notebook, written after his wife Joy Davidman died, records grief from the inside: disorientation, anger, fading memory, and gradual recovery. Clinicians and bereaved readers widely cite it as a first-person account of acute grief. The lived-experience counterpart to the research sources. It is short and widely read.
The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss
Neuroscientist Mary-Frances O'Connor explains grief as a learning process: the brain must update its map of a loved one who is no longer there. The book draws on neuroimaging and attachment research, and compares typical grief with prolonged grief.
Cautioning Health-Care Professionals: Bereaved Persons Are Misguided Through the Stages of Grief
An open-access paper by Stroebe, Schut and Boerner (Omega, 2017). It explains why the five-stages model lacks empirical support, how it can mislead bereaved people, and which evidence-based models, including the Dual Process Model, have replaced it.
Grief and mourning gone awry: pathway and course of complicated grief
A free review by Katherine Shear in Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience (2012). It sets out the acute-to-integrated grief model, explains how rumination and avoidance derail mourning, and describes the principles behind complicated grief treatment.
Prolonged Grief Disorder
The official, short source for where normal grief ends and the disorder begins. The American Psychiatric Association's patient page on the DSM-5-TR diagnosis. It covers the 12-month threshold, the eight core symptoms, a 4–15% prevalence estimate, risk factors, and evidence-based treatments such as CBT and prolonged grief therapy. Reviewed in August 2025.
Center for Prolonged Grief (Columbia School of Social Work)
Katherine Shear's Columbia center explains how acute grief becomes integrated and when it becomes prolonged grief. It offers public guides, worksheets, self-assessment measures, a therapist locator, and training in Prolonged Grief Therapy, the most extensively tested treatment.