COURTESY OF AMY AMIDON
HEALING
dered to do something it is by definition legal and moral.” Difficult
problems might arise from official
recognition of moral injury: how
to measure the intensity of the
pain, for instance, and whether
the government should offer compensation, as it does for PTSD.
“Moral injury is a touchy topic,
and for a long time [mental health
care] providers have been nervous
about addressing it because they
felt inexperienced or they felt it
was a religious issue,” said Amy
Amidon, a staff psychologist at the
San Diego Naval Medical Center
who oversees its moral injury/moral repair therapy group. “And service members have been very hesitant to talk about it, nervous about
how it would affect their career.”
But things are changing. As recently as 2009, Litz was writing
that despite evidence of a rising
tide of moral injury among troops
from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, clinicians and researchers were “failing to pay sufficient
attention” to the problem, that
“questions about moral injury
[were] not being addressed,” and
that clinicians who came across
cases of moral injury were “at a
loss” because existing therapies
for PTSD were not designed to ad-
HUFFINGTON
03.16-23.14
“We are not going to brush it aside.
It did happen and it wasn’t OK.
The point is to help them feel
OK sitting in the darkness with
the evil they experienced.”
dress moral injury directly.
In a recent phone conversation,
however, Litz said moral injury
has become a significant area of
interest among clinical scientists.
“What’s new is that we are trying to study it in a more scientific
way and finding ways of treating
moral injury — and that’s unprec-
Amy Amidon,
a staff
psychologist
at the San
Diego Naval
Medical
Center who
oversees its
moral injury/
moral repair
therapy group.