Brain scans reveal grief gives both pleasure as well as pain

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When you lose a loved one, the memory of them lingers for a long time. The memory will come at all times and at all places. The more you love someone, the more the grief in my opinion. Researchers and psychologists like Sigmund Freud have tried or trying to find out what causes grief and how it affects depression behavior.

Some dwell on it for a long time hoping thinking about their loved ones will comfort them. Most of the time it doesn’t solve the pain, just seems to add a little more. But researchers find that it gives pleasure as well.

Researchers like Mary-Frances O’Connor from UCLA are using modern techniques to try to understand grief and its influence on us. She and others calls this as “complicated grief” that doesn’t go away even after months and years and interferes with our daily activities.

She told Newsweek:

"Every day you're experiencing yearning for the deceased, looking for them in a crowd, or expecting them to come home."

O’Connor and her colleagues used a MRI machine to probe the brains to study this "complicated grief" in a small batch of women, who lost their close relative to breast cancer.

When one scans the brain during ordinary grief and are showed a picture or a video, it shows up on the scan, some portions of the brain that process emotional pain gets highlighted.

The women with “complicated grief” on the other hand display behavior just like the ones have “ordinary grief” but also some pleasure activity in the brain. In the nucleus accumbens, a brain region associated with pleasure, rewards and addiction gets activated as well.

O’Connor described their responses as follows:

"When the women came out of the scanner, the complicated-grief group rated themselves as feeling more negative than the others…But they also said things like, 'Oh, it was so nice to see my mom again.' These are the ones who pore over picture albums, talk about the person all the time, almost as if she was still here."

She said women with “complicated grief” without being aware of it prolonged their grief because it was giving them pleasure indirectly along with the pain.

The women in that situation were unconsciously prolonging their grief, she concluded, because memories of the person they missed gave them pleasure—as well as pain.

Janice Van Wagner, a 34-year-old Los Angeles woman, who lost her mother because of breast cancer went through this “complicated grief” and went through similar emotions described by O’Connor and her team.

Wagner compared her yearning for her mother to the craving of a drug addict:

"The grief matched the intensity of the relationship…I couldn't stand the pain. Nothing felt pleasurable to me. I couldn't even listen to music."

O’Connor and others estimate that nearly 10 to 20 percent of those suffering from the loss of their loved ones go through this “complicated grief” scenario. They plan to include in DSM-V, the next edition of the standard textbook of mental illness. And hopefully they can prescribe the right course of treatment without pills and complicated procedures.