Inventory of Complicated Grief (ICG) Test

People who want a structured way to examine how bereavement is affecting attention, emotions, relationships, and everyday functioning may find the Inventory of Complicated Grief (ICG) Test useful. As a grief assessment test, it organizes reported loss-related experiences into a severity result, helping a respondent decide which patterns to reflect on and whether broader support or discussion may be appropriate.

What This Assessment Explores

Across this complicated grief questionnaire, the items cover yearning, intrusive thoughts, distressing memories, disbelief, difficulty accepting death, anger, emptiness, loneliness, avoidance, distrust, withdrawal, bitterness, bodily reactions, and perceptions involving the deceased. Together, these themes show how grief may occupy attention, affect relationships, and shape daily life.

These dimensions are:

• Preoccupation and yearning show persistent thoughts of and longing for the deceased.
• Acceptance and disbelief indicate difficulty taking in the death's reality.
• Emotional and relational disruption reflects anger, bitterness, loneliness, distrust, and distance.
• Complicated Grief: 0-76 summarizes severity after a loss; Low 0-25 is the displayed lower band, while Elevated 26-76 is the higher band. Scores above 25 indicate a critical level and high risk of complicated grief, potentially associated with impairment in health and social or occupational functioning.

It distinguishes chronic, delayed, exaggerated, and masked grief.

Methodology and Scientific Basis

Each statement uses a five-point frequency response from Never to Always. The items ask how often experiences have occurred since the death, including thoughts, feelings, behavior, bodily reactions, and perceptions. Responses are combined into one displayed severity score, but the response labels alone do not show how many points each choice contributes.

Conceptually, the online questionnaire is consistent with the Inventory of Complicated Grief (Prigerson et al., 1995), a published measure of maladaptive symptoms after loss. The online questionnaire's display has no stated revalidation, norming procedure, or standardized scoring method; its bands are catalogue bands, not independently established clinical cutoffs. Simon et al. (2011) provides contextual evidence about complicated-grief symptom patterns without establishing norms for this online format.

Interpret an ICG grief scale result as a snapshot of reported severity at the time of completion. Self-report can be influenced by current circumstances, memory, self-awareness, and willingness to disclose. An elevated result reflects greater reported grief severity and may be associated with difficulties in health, relationships, or social and occupational functioning; it is not a diagnosis and should be considered alongside a fuller assessment.