Holly Arrow and William Schumacher
The Conversation
Originally posted May 21, 2017
Here is an excerpt:
The moral conflict created by the violations of “what’s right” generates moral injury when the inability to reconcile wartime actions with a personal moral code creates lasting psychological consequences.
Psychiatrist Jonathan Shay, in his work with Vietnam veterans, defined moral injury as the psychological, social and physiological results of a betrayal of “what’s right” by an authority in a high-stakes situation. In “Achilles In Vietnam,” a book that examines the psychological devastation of war, a Vietnam veteran described a situation in which his commanding officers used tear gas on a village after the veteran and his unit had their gas masks rendered ineffective due to water damage. The veteran stated, “They gassed us almost to death.” This type of “friendly fire” incident is morally wounding in a way that attacks by an enemy are not.
Psychologist Brett Litz and his colleagues expanded this to include self-betrayal and identified “perpetrating, failing to prevent, bearing witness to, or learning about acts that transgress deeply held moral beliefs and expectations” as the cause of moral injury.
Guilt and moral injury
A research study published in 1991 identified combat-related guilt as the best predictor of suicide attempts among a sample of Vietnam veterans with PTSD. Details of the veterans’ experiences connected that guilt to morally injurious events.
The article is here.
