When the personal is academic : thoughts on navigating emotions in research on moral injury

Purpose – How should researchers navigate and interpret the moral emotions evoked in them in research on trauma? In this reflective essay, the authors discuss their experience as researchers on moral injury (MI) in veterans and police personnel in the Netherlands. Stories of MI usually do not allow for a clear-cut categorization of the affected person as a victim or perpetrator. This ambivalence, in fact, is explicitly part of the concept of MI. It means however that researchers face complicated psychological, ethical and methodological challenges during research on MI.

Read more

Forgiveness : A Key Component of Healing From Moral Injury

Service members and veterans can be exposed to potentially traumatic and morally injurious experiences (PMIEs) including participating in, witnessing, or failing to prevent an act(s) that transgresses their core beliefs. Violation of one's deeply held morals and values can be profoundly distressing and shatter one's sense of self at the deepest level. Relationships with self, others, the world, and for some, the Sacred, can also be fractured. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and/or Moral Injury (MI) can result.

Read more

Living alongside past trauma : Lived experiencesof Australian grandchildren of Holocaust survivors

Objective

We explore the experience of intergenerational transmission of trauma in grandchildren of Holocaust survivors.

 

Background

Impacts of mass and collective trauma may exceed those initially affected to include the survivor's extended family and, thus, impact families for generations to come. Understanding these impacts is paramount to developing interventions and support programs for the survivors and their families.

 

Method

Read more

Defining and Assessing the Syndrome of Moral Injury : Initial Findings of the Moral Injury Outcome Scale Consortium

Potentially morally injurious events (PMIEs) entail acts of commission (e.g., cruelty, proscribed or prescribed violence) or omission (e.g., high stakes failure to protect others) and bearing witness (e.g., to grave inhumanity, to the gruesome aftermath of violence), or being the victim of others' acts of commission (e.g., high stakes trust violations) or omission (e.g., being the victim of grave individual or systemic failures to protect) that transgress deeply held beliefs and expectations about right and wrong.

Read more

Moral Injury and Recovery in Uniformed Professionals : Lessons From Conversations Among International Students and Experts

Introduction: In the course of service, military members, leaders, and uniformed professionals are at risk of exposure to potentially morally injurious events (PMIEs). Serious mental health consequences including Moral Injury (MI) and Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) can result. Guilt, shame, spiritual/existential conflict, and loss of trust are described as core symptoms of MI. These can overlap with anxiety, anger, re-experiencing, self-harm, and social problems commonly seen in PTSD.

Read more

Encountering children and child soldiers during military deployments : the impact and implications for moral injury

Background: During a deployment, soldiers must make seemingly impossible decisions, including having to engage with child soldiers. Such moral conflicts may continue to affect service members and veterans in the aftermath of a deployment, sometimes leading to severe moral distress, anguish, and personal crises. Service providers have increasingly argued that as a diagnosis, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) cannot account for these deeply personal and painful moral conflicts.

Read more

Facilitating the transition home after military deployment : a systematic literature review of post-deployment adaptation programmes

Background: Many countries pay special attention to the transition of their military personnel from deployment to home via post-deployment adaptation programmes (PDAPs).

 

Objective: This systematic review aims to provide a structured analysis of structure, process, and outcomes based on available empirical evidence for PDAPs.

 

Read more

Personal characteristics of World War Two survivor offspring related to the presence of indirect intrusions

Background: A substantial proportion of clinical World War Two survivor offspring reports intrusions about war events they did not experience themselves. 

 

Read more

Mother-Child Relationship Representations of Children Born of Sexual Violence in Post-WWII Germany

It is estimated around 1.9 million German women were raped in the post-World War II period. Unwanted pregnancies were common and many women went on to raise these children born of sexual violence (CBSV). Now more than 70 years later, we sought to explore the perceptions of past and present relationships of CBSV with their mothers. Using a combination of qualitative methodologies, we analyzed autobiographical interviews of participants born between 1945–1955 across Germany.

Read more

‘They Call Me Babu’ : the politics of visibility and gendered memories of Dutch colonialism in Indonesia

The 2019 documentary film They Call Me Babu utilises historical film footage including the home movies of one Dutch family with a voiceover in Bahasa Indonesia to narrate the fictionalised experiences of a former female domestic worker in the colonial Netherlands East Indies in the closing decades of Dutch colonial rule from 1939 to 1949. By centring the experiences of ‘babu’, women who worked as nannies and nursemaids for families holding European status, the Dutch-Indonesian director Sarah Beerends endeavours to make these women visible and to narrate their viewpoints.

Read more

Pages