How Long Should It Take to Grieve? Psychiatry Has Come Up With an Answer. – The New York Times

By Ellen Barry

March 18, 2022

“After more than a decade of argument, psychiatry’s most powerful body in the United States added a new disorder this week to its diagnostic manual: prolonged grief.

The decision marks an end to a long debate within the field of mental health, steering researchers and clinicians to view intense grief as a target for medical treatment, at a moment when many Americans are overwhelmed by loss.

The new diagnosis, prolonged grief disorder, was designed to apply to a narrow slice of the population who are incapacitated, pining and ruminating a year after a loss, and unable to return to previous activities.

Its inclusion in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders means that clinicians can now bill insurance companies for treating people for the condition.”

David Lindsay Jr.

Hamden, CT | NYT comment:

Fortunately, not everything is about money. I applaud this report by Ellen Barry and the doctors behind this research. I have a friend who lost someone close, and after three years, they are still reclusive. In ancient China, three years was the official, minimum grieving period for a family member. Maybe they knew something. Probably some people will benefit greatly from professional help. I lost my eldest son to heroin laced with fentanyl, just before his 21st birthday, and while the grieving never stops, the pain lessened significantly after about ten years. However, I never stopped functioning, since my self remedy was to throw myself into my writing. I now blog here and at InconvenientNews.net, and after Austin’s death, I finished my first novel, “The Tay Son Rebellion, Historical Fiction on Eighteenth Century Vietnam,” which I had first drafted in the 1980’s. One great memory I have just before Austin passed, he and I drove to Berea Kentucky, and read my unpublished manuscript out loud to each other in the car. He liked the book, and made excellent comments.

Review: ‘The Road Not Taken’ in Vietnam – (Edward Lansdale) – WSJ

By Robert D. Kaplan Jan. 5, 2018 4:34 p.m. ET 15 COMMENTS

“Edward Lansdale (1908-87) was one of America’s most important military thinkers and practitioners, and yet he is barely known to the wider world. In “The Road Not Taken,” Max Boot aptly calls him “the American T.E. Lawrence ”: eccentric, rebellious and charismatic, a man who had an uncanny way of bonding with Third World leaders and who believed that the art of war was, as Mr. Boot puts it, “to attract the support of the uncommitted.” He changed the. . .”

Source: Review: ‘The Road Not Taken’ in Vietnam – WSJ

I guess Edward Lansdale was my kind of warrior.  As I researched my historical novel of eighteenth century Vietnam, The Tay Son Rebellion, I realized late in the 17 year book effort that I had not read Sun Tzu, the great Chinese military historian,  but one by Musashi, So I finally read The Art of War by Sun Tsu. Is is too bad our military hadn’t studied it before Vietnam, because you can be sure the Vietnames Generals all knew of these ancient tactics, and lived by them.

Know your enemy as well as yourself. Always use dipolomacy, or espionage. Military force shows your incompentance. Never fight unless you are sure you will win. If you are not sure you can win, retreat, and wait for odds to change while you set ambushes and traps. Never invade another country for any long period of time. Always get in, do your business, and get out. If you occupy a foreign country, your supply lines will be long, and your host country will slowly eat you alive.  More at http://www.TheTaysonRebellion.com