Forever Changed: Predicting Grief and Growth After an Opioid-Related Loss

Abstract

Over 564,000 people died from an opioid-related overdose from 1999 to 2020. Minimal research has examined factors contributing to grief outcomes for the thousands of people mourning these stigmatized deaths. Informed by the model of resilience and transactional model of stress, this study investigated the degree to which disenfranchised grief, social support, and coping predicted grief outcomes in a sample of 159 people grieving an opioid-related death. When predicting prolonged grief, avoidant emotional coping (β = 0.55) alone accounted for unique variance. Active emotional coping (β = 0.28) and problem-focused coping (β = 0.40) explained unique variance in posttraumatic growth. These findings may inform research and clinical practice and improve grief outcomes for this vast, and understudied population.