When health professionals experience moral distress during routine clinical practice, they are challenged to maintain integrity through conscientious practice guided by ethical principles and virtues that promote the dignity of all human beings who need care. Their integrity also needs preservation during a crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic, especially when faced with triage protocols that allocate scarce resources.

Background

Moral distress (MD) and moral injury (MI) are related constructs describing the negative consequences of morally challenging stressors. Despite growing support for the clinical relevance of these constructs, ongoing challenges regarding measurement quality risk limiting research and clinical advances. This study summarizes the nature, quality, and utility of existing MD and MI scales, and provides recommendations for future use.

Method

Objective: Complex posttraumatic stress disorder (CPTSD) and moral injury are receiving increasing empirical attention. The network approach offers a novel method to understand the association between such mental health constructs.

There are times within health and social care settings where professionals ask recipients of services to make complex and life altering choices. How these choices are presented by professionals has a profound impact on the experience of those accessing services. These experiences pattern their subsequent understanding of and response to both services and the professionals working within them.

The purpose of this qualitative hermeneutic phenomenological study was to understand the lived experiences of United States Army combat veterans who have supported combat operations at least once over the past fourteen years in either Iraq or Afghanistan who self-identified as suffering from symptoms of moral injury.

Decades after World War II, major commemorations are still organised to collectively remember this war. Aiming for inclusive societies, the perspectives of immigrants with different war experiences are important to be heard in relation to these commemorations.

Background: Despite its popularity, evidence of the effectiveness of Psychological First Aid (PFA) is scarce.

Objective: To assess whether PFA, compared to psychoeducation (PsyEd), an attention placebo control, reduces PTSD and depressive symptoms three months post-intervention. 

Background
The high incidence of potentially traumatic events (PTEs) in Indonesia warrants early identification of those with probable trauma-related disorders in order to tailor prevention and intervention for trauma-related symptoms.

Objectives
This study aims to adapt and validate a novel brief transdiagnostic screener, the Global Psychotrauma Screen (GPS), in Indonesian undergraduate students.

Er heerst een serene sfeer in de woonkamer van het karakteristieke huis in Zwolle. Muziek uit de zeventiende eeuw, in een modern jasje, klinkt uit de speakers. ‘Dit is  L’Arpeggiata, ken je dat? Ik vind dat heerlijk. Oud en nieuw komen daarin samen.’ Kleine kans dat ik dat kende. Goed klonk het wel. Anton Hafkenscheid werkt al bijna 40 jaar als klinisch psycholoog en psychotherapeut bij het Sinai Centrum, een landelijk expertisecentrum voor trauma gerelateerde klachten en PTSS.

Onlangs werd een patiënt aangemeld met vermoedens van persoonlijkheidsproblematiek en een stoornis in het gebruik van cannabis. Na onderzoek bleek er ook sprake van een waanstoornis, agressieregulatieproblematiek en een posttraumatische stressstoornis (PTSS). Na het inzetten van cognitieve gedragstherapie (CGT) bij middelengebruik, de module Held Zonder Geweld en eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) werd de behandeling afgerond. Geïntegreerd behandelen bij deze patiënt bleek voor de PTSS-klachten, de agressieregulatieproblematiek en het middelengebruik succesvol te zijn.