Colin Murray Parkes

Introduction

Colin Murray Parkes (March 1928 – 13 January 2024) was a British psychiatrist who did more than anyone else to make bereavement a subject of systematic research. When he proposed studying it at the Maudsley Hospital in the 1960s, a senior professor told him: "What you have described isn't a project, it's a life's work." He wrote hundreds of papers and a series of books, set up the first hospice-based bereavement service, chaired the charity that became Britain's national bereavement organisation, and advised governments and relief agencies after disasters from Aberfan to the Indian Ocean tsunami.

He was a psychiatrist, not a psychologist, and he is included here because his account of grief — as the adaptation to a lost attachment relationship rather than as an illness — reshaped how psychology understands loss. His best-known sentence, from Bereavement: Studies of Grief in Adult Life (1972), is that the pain of grief "is, perhaps, the price we pay for love." Queen Elizabeth II quoted the line in her message of condolence after the September 11 attacks, which carried it to a global audience.

Early Life and Education

Parkes was born in London in March 1928 (sources give 6 or 28 March), the son of Gwen, née Roberts, and Eric Parkes, a solicitor. He attended Epsom College in Surrey and trained in medicine at Westminster Hospital Medical School, qualifying as a doctor in 1951.

He spent two years as a junior house physician at Westminster, then moved to Kettering General Hospital in the Midlands. Two years of national service with the RAF medical corps followed, after which he joined the Institute of Psychiatry at the Maudsley. It was there, noticing that grief rarely appeared in the indexes of the standard psychiatry textbooks, that he settled on the subject he would work on for the rest of his life.

Academic and Professional Career

After publishing his first bereavement research in 1962, Parkes joined the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, where he worked with John Bowlby for thirteen years. The collaboration ran in both directions: Parkes supplied the adult data that Bowlby's attachment theory needed, and Bowlby supplied the framework Parkes used to explain why loss is so disruptive.

In 1975 he left the Tavistock to become Senior Lecturer in Psychiatry at the Royal London Hospital Medical College, a post he held until retiring in 1993.

Alongside the academic posts ran a parallel career in palliative care. Parkes worked closely with Dame Cicely Saunders — "the single-minded mother of palliative care," he called her — on the planning and launch of St Christopher's Hospice in Sydenham, south London, in 1967. He established there the first bereavement service based in a hospice: trained volunteers who visited families at home and ran support groups, including for staff. He was consultant psychiatrist at St Christopher's until 2007 and remained involved with the hospice until 2014, and held the same role at St Joseph's Hospice in Hackney from 1993 to 2007.

His association with Cruse, the bereavement charity, began in 1964 when he joined its council after publishing work showing that many widows were suffering severe and protracted grief. He became chairman in 1972, oversaw its expansion into a national service, and was made life president in 1992. He was appointed OBE for services to bereaved people in 1996. He edited the journal Bereavement from its launch in 1982 until 2019, received the Times/Sternberg award for achievement over seventy in 2012, and accepted an honorary doctorate from the University of Bath in 2013.

He married Patricia Ainsworth in 1957. He continued to write, lecture and consult into his early nineties, and died on 13 January 2024, aged 95.

Major Contributions to Psychology

Bereavement as a Process of Adaptation

Parkes's foundational study followed London widows through the first year after their husbands' deaths, in their own homes. The work established that grief is not a short-lived emotional reaction that resolves on its own but a prolonged process with recognisable features. He described four overlapping phases: numbness or shock; yearning and searching, in which the bereaved person looks for the person who has died; disorganisation and despair, as ordinary routines and assumptions fail; and recovery and reorganisation, in which new patterns of living are built.

He was careful that these should not be read as a fixed sequence everyone must pass through. His point was that grief is an adaptation to the loss of an attachment relationship, and that its course depends on the relationship, the circumstances of the death, earlier experience, social environment and available support.

Psychosocial Transitions

Parkes generalised this into the idea of the psychosocial transition: a change so substantial that it alters not only emotions but identity, roles, routines and assumptions about how the world works. The framework made it possible to compare bereavement with other upheavals — divorce, migration, amputation, loss of a job — and to ask what they have in common as problems of adaptation rather than treating each as a separate pathology.

Attachment and Loss

Working from Bowlby, Parkes argued that grief is disruptive because an attachment figure is not only a companion. The bereaved person may simultaneously lose a source of emotional security, daily routines, a social role, expectations about the future, part of their identity, and the assumptions on which ordinary life is organised. This is why, in his account, grief is not simply an emotion to be eliminated but the work of adapting to a world that has changed while the internal relationship persists.

Traumatic Bereavement and Disaster Work

Parkes applied his framework to sudden, violent and multiple deaths, where grief is complicated by trauma. He worked on the aftermath of the Aberfan disaster (1966), the Bradford City stadium fire (1985), the capsize of the Herald of Free Enterprise (1987), the Lockerbie bombing (1988), the Rwandan genocide (1995), the September 11 attacks and the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. Aberfan taught him, he said, that bereavement care is ultimately something communities do rather than professionals — and that volunteers can do a great deal of it.

Grief and Health

Parkes also documented the physical and psychiatric costs of bereavement, showing raised rates of illness, consultation and mortality among the widowed. The finding helped justify bereavement services as a health matter, and it remains one of the most cited — and most argued over — results in the field.

Major Publications

Bereavement: Studies of Grief in Adult Life (1972) — the book that made his name; draws on the London widows study and sets out grief as psychosocial adaptation.
The Place of Attachment in Human Behavior (1982) — co-edited, situating attachment within the wider pattern of human behaviour and loss.
Facing Death (1981).
Recovery from Bereavement (1983, with Robert S. Weiss) — the Harvard Bereavement Study, a longitudinal comparison of widows and widowers.
Attachment Across the Life Cycle (1991) — extends attachment thinking beyond childhood.
Death and Bereavement Across Cultures (1997) — how mourning is shaped by cultural expectation and ritual.
Love and Loss: The Roots of Grief and Its Complications (2006) — his late synthesis, linking attachment, love and complicated grief.
The Price of Love: The Selected Works of Colin Murray Parkes (2015).

Impact and Legacy

Parkes turned grief from something that happened privately into something that could be studied, funded, taught and resourced. Hospice bereavement services, volunteer bereavement support, disaster psychosocial response, and the attachment-based understanding of mourning all carry his fingerprints. His insistence that the dead person's family is also the patient is now standard in palliative care.

His work is nevertheless contested on four fronts.

The phase model. Parkes's four phases, like every stage model of grief, has been criticised as a description that hardens into a prescription. Prospective work by George Bonanno and colleagues, assessing people before as well as after a loss, found not one normative trajectory but several, with a resilient pattern of low and stable distress describing close to half of the bereaved. Wortman and Silver had earlier argued that the field's assumptions about necessary distress and required "working through" outran the evidence. Bonanno has also contested the existence of delayed grief. Parkes anticipated part of this, warning that his phases were not a universal sequence — but the vocabulary he established is still used as if it were one.

The samples. The foundational data came from London widows studied in the 1960s, and the Harvard study from Boston widows and widowers. How far conclusions drawn from conjugal bereavement in two Western cities transfer to the loss of a child, to traumatic death, or to other cultures is an open question — one Parkes himself gestured at by editing a volume on death across cultures.

The causal reading of the health findings. The association between bereavement and raised morbidity and mortality is well replicated, but interpreting it as causation is disputed: selection into marriage and widowhood, shared environment, and changes in health behaviour all offer alternative explanations.

The pathologisation debate, in which he stands on both sides. Parkes spent his career arguing that grief is not an illness, writing a piece called "Grief as an Illness" precisely to question that framing. Yet his own categories of atypical and chronic grief are part of the lineage that produced prolonged grief disorder in ICD-11 and DSM-5-TR. Critics of that diagnosis, among them Cacciatore and Frances writing in The Lancet Psychiatry in 2022, called it "a huge mistake," argued that it invites careless prescribing, and held that "pathologising grief is an insult to the dignity of loving relationships." Defenders reply that prevalence estimates of roughly 7 to 10 per cent of the bereaved — and only 2 to 3 per cent in the general population — mean the diagnosis captures a genuine minority rather than medicalising a universal experience, and that factor-analytic work shows prolonged grief is distinct from depression and PTSD rather than simply severe sadness.

Parkes did not live to see the diagnosis settled. His own position, stated repeatedly, was that grief needs strong social support and time rather than treatment, and that the task is not to stop feeling it but to make a changed life gradually livable again.

Learn More

John Bowlby — whose attachment theory gave Parkes his explanation of why loss is disruptive
George Bonanno — whose prospective work challenged stage and phase models of grieving
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross — whose five stages are the other widely cited account of the shape of grief
Attachment theory — the framework Parkes applied to adult loss
PTSD — where traumatic bereavement overlaps with the trauma literature
All Psychologists — browse the full biographical collection.

References

Parkes, C. M. (1972). Bereavement: Studies of Grief in Adult Life. International Universities Press.