DECEMBER 2012 VOLUME 51  NUMBER 4 Editorial: Experiencing Sorrow and Loss JAY LEBOW 1 Fam Proc 51:437–439, 2012 S ome topics in family therapy and family research always seem to be with us, explored in numerous studies and articles. A subject may captivate attention or become a prior- ity through the support of funding agencies which influence the focus of scholarship. Mostly, this works for the development of the field over time as knowledge accrues about many important subjects. However, because there is no master plan about what occupies the center of attention, important topics, especially uncomfortable ones, can be underrep- resented and even ignored. In family therapy (and even in this journal), issues concerned with gender and culture were largely unattended to for many years, as model builders, writers, and researchers were caught up in what seemed to be larger ideas of epistemology and effective intervention. Similarly, for some time, discussion about homeostasis almost completely obliterated notions of morphogenesis and resilience. Perhaps there are no topics more underrepresented in the family and mental health fields than sorrow and loss. Although these subjects have vast importance for families (most family rituals are created in relation to them), sorrow and loss are rarely spoken of in either the research or clinical domains or in journals such as Family Process. Consider- ation of loss in families has long been with us, most especially in the groundbreaking work of Walsh and McGoldrick (2004) and Bowen (2004). However, this subject is perhaps too painful to explore comfortably or often. Recently, the American Psychiatric Association has even proposed the medicalization of sorrow in the DSM-V in stating criteria for when the extent and length of grief becomes a syndrome rather than an experience (Shear et al., 2011). Such forays point to the difficulty mental health professionals have in finding ways to cope with and speak to such subjects. 1 Editor, Family Process 437 Family Process, Vol. 51, No. 4, 2012 © FPI, Inc. doi: 10.1111/famp.12007 PROCESS