Porto, September: a grief conference with a level reserved for diagnosis and treatment
- The third European Grief Conference runs in Porto, Portugal, on 9-11 September 2026 at the Super Bock Arena Congress Center, hosted by SPTFE and Universidade de Maia in partnership with Bereavement Network Europe, the Danish National Center for Grief and the Irish Hospice Foundation. Registration is open. The early-bird window closed on 15 May, so the regular fee of 540 EUR now applies.
- The membership fee did not rise after the early-bird cutoff: members of Bereavement Network Europe, the Inluto Association or SPTFE still pay 450 EUR with proof of membership uploaded during registration. Students pay 320 EUR with a verification document. The fee covers all conference sessions, lunches and coffee breaks.
- The pre-conference day on 9 September carries four workshops, 14:00 to 17:30, one per participant, 100 EUR on top of registration, capacity limited, certificate of participation provided. Workshop 4 is "How to identify and treat Prolonged Grief Disorder with evidence-based methods", facilitated by Maja O'Connor of Aarhus University and Paul Boelen.
- The programme is built on four levels, from societal grief literacy up to the diagnosis and treatment of complex grief. The Level 3 plenary panel brings together Alison Penny of the Childhood Bereavement Network, Clare Killikelly of the University of Zurich, Maja O'Connor and João Salgado of SPTFE and Universidade de Maia, chaired by Allan Køster. Abstract submission has closed; the preliminary programme dated 20 July is downloadable from the conference site.
Most grief training a clinician is offered falls into one of two shapes: a warm weekend with no diagnostic spine, or a research meeting whose findings never reach a consulting room. The third European Grief Conference is worth a look because its programme does not settle into either shape. It is stratified into four explicit levels, and the top one is unambiguously clinical: diagnosis and treatment of complex grief reactions in the minority of bereaved people who need specialist therapeutic response, kept structurally separate from public grief literacy and general support.
That separation matters more than it sounds. The single most common error in bereavement care is treating the whole bereaved population as a clinical population, and the second most common is treating prolonged grief disorder as ordinary sorrow that needs more time. A conference that architecturally distinguishes Level 0 from Level 3 is at least organising around the right question.
What is actually on the programme
Three days: pre-conference workshops and a welcome reception on 9 September, then two full days across three parallel streams – Research, Practice, and Policy & Education – plus rotating special themes including funerals, suicide, family, the arts and grief and artificial intelligence. Sessions run in rooms named Saudade, Memoria, Abraco and Aurora inside the Super Bock Arena, with an overflow auditorium at the Biblioteca Almeida Garrett next door.
For the PGD-focused reader the density is in the research stream. On the printed preliminary programme: Maja O'Connor presenting evidence- and consensus-based clinical practice recommendations for treating prolonged grief disorder in adults; Kirsten Smith on internet cognitive therapy for PGD as a developmental case series; Thomas Abel de Lang on a single-case experimental protocol treating PGD via CBT for insomnia; Bianca Schreyer on growth mixture models of symptom trajectories, that is, who actually responds to grief psychotherapy and who does not; Paul Boelen on machine-learning identification of interacting risk factors; Laura Hofmann on the PTSD, complex PTSD and PGD tangle after suicide bereavement.
The pre-conference workshop is the operational item, and also the least documented one. The site publishes its title and its two facilitators and nothing further: no outline, no account of how the three and a half hours are spent. What I can add is my own reading of their published work rather than anything the conference states – Boelen and O'Connor both publish on grief-focused cognitive behavioural treatment of prolonged grief, which is where the treatment evidence in this field is concentrated. Whether the session delivers on its title is not something the published programme lets you check in advance.
Who should book, and who should not
Book if you carry bereaved clients and have never had to defend a PGD diagnosis to yourself; if the boundary between severe grief and disorder is something you currently judge by feel; if you work in palliative care, oncology, crisis services or primary-care liaison and need a defensible referral threshold.
Skip it if you want a supervised skills course. This is a conference with a workshop attached, not a certification pathway, and nothing in it substitutes for supervised cases. Skip it too if your caseload is mainly acute bereavement in the first months, where the evidence base for structured intervention is thin and watchful support is usually the correct answer.
Three and a half hours is a starting point, not a competency – the competency arrives later, from supervised cases.
The conference site publishes no CE or CPD credit hours, only a certificate of participation for the workshop; the working language is English, and the total cost with the workshop, flights and accommodation is a real barrier. The organisers state they are aware of the difficulties faced by colleagues from lower-income countries and invite enquiries about support.