Grief and depression share enough features that they are frequently conflated, but the relationship between them is more specific than simple similarity. Grief is the appropriate psychological response to loss, and in its uncomplicated form it runs its own course and does not require clinical treatment. Depression that is connected to loss tends to develop when the grief has been interrupted or blocked in some way: when the loss happened too early or too suddenly for adequate processing, when the circumstances surrounding it made mourning difficult, when the relationship to what was lost was ambivalent or complicated, or when earlier unresolved losses are activated by a current one. In these situations, what looks like grief on the surface has taken on the structure of depression.
Dr. Steinbok's psychodynamic approach to loss-connected depression at his Boca Raton practice involves creating the conditions for the mourning that has not been completed to occur within the therapeutic relationship. This is not simply talking about the loss; it is a more specific clinical process of examining the relationship to what was lost, the feelings that could not be felt at the time, and the ways the unprocessed grief has organized itself into a depressive state. Patients in Boca Raton dealing with depression that they can trace to a specific loss or series of losses, or who recognize that certain kinds of endings or disappointments reliably trigger depressive episodes, often find that the psychodynamic work Dr. Steinbok offers reaches the grief in a way that previous treatment did not address.
