Grief and loss: understanding your feelings and finding support

Bereavement is another way of describing the experiences someone goes through when someone they care about dies. Bereavement can happen after the death of anyone who is important to you – a friend, family member, someone like a teacher or family friend, or a pet.

Grief describes the distress that people can experience when someone they care about dies. It’s often associated with sadness, but often people who are grieving feel a range of different emotions.

Sometimes people talk about grief if they’ve experienced other losses too, like breaking up with their partner, losing their job, or changes to their mental health care. This page focuses on grief following bereavement, when someone has died.

Everyone has their own unique experience of grief. What it’s like depends on lots of factors, like how old they are, the relationship they had with the person who’s died, how the person died, and the support they have around them.

There’s no right or wrong way to feel if you’re experiencing grief. Some people find that their feelings change a lot, and that big emotions catch them by surprise.

If you’re experiencing grief, you might feel:

All of these feelings are entirely normal, but knowing that does not necessarily make it any easier to cope.

When someone’s grieving, self-care can also be difficult, for example, if they’re struggling to sleep or if they experience changes in appetite. Grief can also cause physical aches and pains, as well as physical health problems.

In most cases, grief is not a mental health problem. It’s a natural response to something really difficult – and it’s understandable that it makes a big difference to people’s lives.

There’s no set timeline for experiencing grief – some people struggle for longer than others, and it’s normal to sometimes find things difficult even a long time after someone’s died (for example, on the anniversary of their death or on their birthday). But most people will start to feel better with time.

Sometimes, people are diagnosed with a mental health condition if their grief gets harder to cope with over time rather than getting easier to manage, or if they’re still not able to go back to their everyday life (for example, going back to work or education or taking part in hobbies) after a long time. In these cases, they might be diagnosed with prolonged grief disorder or complicated grief.

And sometimes, grief can lead to someone developing a mental health condition like depression, an anxiety disorder, or an eating disorder, or using unhealthy coping methods like self-harm.

People find different ways to cope with grief. For most people, things don’t get better straight away – and they may always miss the person who has died and feel sad about their death. With time, though, they can start to find hope and enjoyment in things again. If you’re grieving, there are things you can do to cope:

If you’re struggling to cope with grief, or if grief isn’t getting better with time, the first step is usually to talk to a trusted adult. This can be difficult if the adults in your life are also experiencing grief, but your experiences are important and you deserve support. If you’re worried about talking to someone at home, you could also talk to a teacher or youth worker, for example.

They can talk with you about what’s going on and together, you can make a plan to get support. This might include things like visiting your GP or exploring local services that provide support for young people experiencing grief.

There are also lots of helplines that exist to give young people safe spaces to talk about grief and loss.

You can find more information on how to talk to someone who’s struggling, how to listen, and understanding boundaries and responsibility in the ‘Supporting others’ section of the website.

If someone you care about is grieving, it can be difficult to know how to support them, especially because our society isn’t always open about death. As well as being a good friend and including them in the things you do, there are some things you could try to help them.