COURTESY OF BRETT LITZ
HEALING
in Philadelphia. Many of his patients suffer from both Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and moral
injury, and he is searching for
ways to ease their pain.
“People mostly try to push
those experiences away and not
look at them, and they inevitably end up with an oversimplified conclusion about what it all
meant,” he said. “We’re trying to
get them to unearth the beliefs
that are causing their distress,
and then help them analyze it,
consider the evidence for and
against the way they see it, and
ultimately develop a more nuanced belief about what happened and what their responsibility actually is.”
For most veterans with moral
injury, there is little help. In
contrast to the extensive training and preparation the government provides troops for battle,
the Defense Department and the
VA have almost nothing specifically for the moral wounds that
endure after they return.
Only one small program, based
at the San Diego Naval Medical
Center, routinely provides therapy
designed for moral injury. Several clinicians launched the program early in 2013 after realizing
HUFFINGTON
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“I’m very respectful of how difficult
it is for them to embrace. After all,
service members have to follow
orders, and if ordered to do something
it is by definition legal and moral.”
that many of their PTSD patients
needed a different kind of help.
The therapies and drugs developed to treat PTSD don’t get at
the root of moral injury, experts
say, because they focus on extinguishing fear. PTSD therapy often
takes the form of asking the patient to re-live the damaging ex-
Brett Litz,
a clinical
psychologist
and professor
at Boston
University,
has done
pioneering
work in
defining
and treating
moral injury.