Moral injury is the persistent mental or emotional distress resulting from events that challenge one’s moral beliefs. It is characterised by intense shame, guilt, worthlessness, disgust or anger and can contribute towards the development of serious mental disorders. The nature of working in prisons means that staff often face physically and psychologically challenging scenarios, and prison staff report high rates of mental ill-health and suicidal thoughts.

Following the death of a loved one, both approach behaviors related to the deceased (i.e., engagement with feelings, memories, and/or reminders of the deceased) and the avoidance of reminders of the death are theorized to precipitate severe and persistent grief reactions, termed prolonged grief. The “approach-avoidance processing hypothesis” holds that these behavioral tendencies occur simultaneously in prolonged grief disorder (PGD). We tested this hypothesis using a novel free-viewing attention task.

This pilot study aimed to understand the moderating role of context processing (i.e. encoding and memorizing) when mothers are confronted with threatening stimuli and undergo physiologic monitoring in order to understand a possible mechanism favoring intergenerational transmission of posttraumatic stress. Thirty-one mothers (M age = 33.87 years, SD = 4.14) and their toddlers (M age = 22.66 months, SD = 7.01) participated in the study. Mothers reported adverse life events (ALE), their current posttraumatic stress symptoms (PTSS), as well as regulatory problems of their toddler.

Despite a growing recognition of mental health challengesworldwide, there remains a significant gap between the demandfor and the availability of mental health services. The WHO es-timates that globally, up to 71% of individuals with severe mental illnesses such as psychosis receive no treatment, and accessis even more limited in low-income countries. Barriers such asstigma, resource shortages, and insufficiently trained profes-sionals may exacerbate this issue.