Chronic pain and unrecognized grief: epistemic barriers to personal and social recognition

Med Health Care Philos. 2026 Mar 9. doi: 10.1007/s11019-026-10333-7. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

What is it to grieve? What is the nature of grief? An intuitive and straightforward answer to these questions, one that will be familiar to all of us, is that grief is an emotional reaction to the death of a close loved one. Grief is intimately connected to bereavement. However, grief can arise in situations beyond the death of a significant other and is revealed to be a much more complex and heterogeneous experience. People can grieve over all sorts of losses. What makes our response to these losses one of grief? We can understand all these losses as involving a loss of life possibilities, which impacts one's practical identity and who one takes oneself to be. Importantly, a close examination of the phenomenology of chronic pain helps illuminate the ways in which it also involves the kind of losses that we can grieve over. The losses involved in experiences of chronic pain impact one's practical identity in ways that can lead to grief. This chronic pain grief remains largely unrecognized, however. We outline four epistemic barriers to recognizing the grief involved in experiences of chronic pain.

PMID:41796423 | DOI:10.1007/s11019-026-10333-7