| Previous quantitative reviews of research on the effectiveness of psychotherapeutic interventions for grief have yielded divergent findings and not included the majority of the available controlled outcome studies. The present meta-analysis summarizes results from 58 studies to offer a more comprehensive integration of this literature. Overall, this review assessed (a) the effectiveness of grief therapies and clinically-relevant moderators, (b) trajectories of improvement for study participants, and (c) the relative efficacy of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) interventions compared to other approaches to helping the bereaved. Although the overall analyses produced weak effects for grief therapies, interventions that targeted distressed grievers were shown to generate outcomes that approach the successes of psychotherapy in general. Evidence suggested that the discouraging results for interventions that failed to screen for indications of distress could be attributed to a tendency among no-intervention controls to improve naturally over the course of time. There was also preliminary support for the benefit of CBT; however, it appears that CBT interventions were more effective when researchers integrated non-CBT techniques and the subset of studies with bona fide comparisons failed to show a significant overall advantage for CBT interventions. |
