| While any type of death can be difficult for family survivors, those that lose youthful family members suddenly and unexpectedly tend to have especially severe, and potentially complicated grief responses. Death by Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy (HCM) imposes each of these characteristics. HCM, a surprisingly common but not publically well-known heart condition, is the most frequent cause of sudden death in young adults. Although one in five hundred people worldwide have HCM, medical channels for understanding and dealing with HCM are only recently developing and research exploring the psychological experience of losing a loved one to HCM has not appeared in the existing published literature.;The present study uses survey reports to obtain an understanding of the population of HCM family survivors. Eighty-six survivors of HCM loss completed the following: (1) a demographic questionnaire; (2) a grief experiences questionnaire; (3) the Grief Evaluation Measure (GEM); (4) the Texas Revised Inventory of Grief (TRIG); (5) the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9); and (6) the Interpersonal Guilt Questionnaire-67 (IGQ-67).;Survey responses mostly confirm several hypotheses that were constructed from prior research findings from other bereavement studies. They reveal that the loss of a spouse, sibling or child to HCM places survivors at high risk of developing profound grief reactions compared to survivors of anticipated loss. These grief reactions tend to endure over many years and include significantly high levels of depression, survivor guilt, and omnipotent responsibility guilt that are commonly accompanied by the demise of the survivor's worldview along with alterations to key relationships and social interactions. In multiple regression analyses, depression was most predictive of the grief reported by participants followed by omnipotent responsibility guilt. Implications of the results and recommendations for future research and clinical treatment are also discussed. |
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