Anniversary reactions
A return of grief, low mood, restlessness or body symptoms around a date tied to a loss: the day of the death, a birthday, a wedding anniversary, a season. Hilgard also described a quieter form, when a person reaches the age a parent was at death, or their child reaches the age they were when the parent died.
What drives it
The body and the calendar keep the date even when the mind has not marked it, so the low can start before the person has noticed what day is coming. Useful for identification because a slump that returns at the same time each year, with no new cause, may be tied to a date the person has stopped connecting it to.
How it shows
Work
Snapping at colleagues in the second week of March every year, then realizing it is the month the business partner died. Booking leave around a date without quite knowing why.
Relationships
Arguments with a partner in the run-up to the date, then calm after it. A family that never speaks of the day and yet all phone each other on it.
Self
Look back over a few years of diaries or messages for a time of year when your sleep, mood or health dips. Notice the year you turn the age a parent was when they died.
What tells it apart
Grief bursts and STUG reactions (Rando): A grief burst may come from any cue, at any time. An anniversary reaction is more likely when the low is tied to the calendar and builds in the days or weeks before a date.
Major depression: Low mood that rises before a date and lifts after it is more likely an anniversary reaction. Low mood that stays for weeks whatever the date, with loss of interest and self-blame, may be depression.
Triggers: A trigger sets off a reaction on the spot. An anniversary reaction may build slowly over days, sometimes before the person has consciously noticed the date.
A test
Lay a few years of low patches against the dates of losses in the family. If the lows cluster in the weeks before the same dates, an anniversary reaction may be part of the picture.
Questions to carry
- What date is coming up, and what happened on it?
- What do I do with myself in the week before that date each year?
Go deeper
- Read: The Other Side of Sadness, George A. Bonanno, 2009, revised 2019. Written for readers by a psychologist who has followed bereaved people for years. He questions the idea that grief moves through set stages and argues that most people come through a loss with more resilience than expected. Much of it rests on his own group's studies.
How strong the research is
clinical. Described in case reports by Hilgard (1953) and Pollock (1970) and widely reported in grief work, but rarely measured. The largest test we found, a Swedish register study of 7,694 adults who had lost a parent and later died by suicide (Grotta and colleagues, JAMA Network Open, 2023), found raised odds in the days around the anniversary of the parent’s death in women, highest after a mother’s death, and no rise in men. It looked only at suicide, so it says nothing about how common milder anniversary lows are.
Where it comes from
Josephine Hilgard, Anniversary reactions in parents precipitated by children, Psychiatry, 1953. George H. Pollock, Anniversary reactions, trauma, and mourning, Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 1970