I think you are misinterpreting what the author means with "medicalize". They aren't saying "require to be treated by a medical professional".

What they're saying is that as a culture, we reason about grief using the tools and concepts of the medical industry. Because it's part of our culture, this is so automatic that it's almost hard to conceive of any other way. But it is indeed a choice to describe grief as a sort of labeled pain which can be explored using falsifiable scientific experiments, is amenable to treatment by medical professionals, is a problem representing a delta between a "normal healthy human" and their current state, etc.

We could just as well have a culture that treats grief as a normal part of the human experience. We could consider a person currently grieving as exactly as healthy and normal as someone playing the saxophone. We could (and some do) consider that the most appropriate people to offer help for grief be spiritual counsellors.

I'm not saying we should handle grief differently. I'm just trying to point out that what the author's saying is that it's a cultural choice the way we present and work through it socially. (But, for what it's worth, I do think we should handle it in a less medical way.)

I think what you are talking about is a problem. Having a medical diagnosis gives personal experience an extra weight in the social realm that's quite problematic. We should all get to say how impactful something for us and the medical folks can have their own standards for when they feel comfortable intervening.

That said, if that's what the author was trying to talk about, I think they are doing so in a way that unfairly indicts the medical system for assertions it doesn't make. They say "Apparently, that’s a disease", but as I said I do not think it is. I think they've misunderstood what makes a disease under the diagnostic criteria they list.

> We could just as well have a culture that treats grief as a normal part of the human experience.

That culture does exist. Even in this article there is an experience of grief that's considered normative in the medical community. Including, I would argue, the authors' grief. I would argue that the medical approach to grief is actually better than other western treatments of grief.

I agree that western cultures (and US culture in particular) is horrible about grief. We want people to be robotic and predictable and not make us think about loss and be sad in private and a whole mess of awful, inhuman things. But I don't think that pressure either comes from the medical community or is furthered by how the medical community talks about grief.