An interesting article exploring why in the past year, 6,500 American former active military personnel have killed themselves, a rate at which suicides have exceeded the annual number of personnel lost in action. Why might this be so?
"For William Nash, a retired Navy psychiatrist who directed the marine corps' combat stress control programme, William Busbee's [a young soldier whose mental distress and suicide provides the human focus of the article] described expressions of torment are all too familiar. He has worked with hundreds of service members who have been grappling with suicidal thoughts, not least when he was posted to Fallujah in Iraq during the height of the fighting in 2004.
He and colleagues in military psychiatry have developed the concept of "moral injury" to help understand the current wave of self-harm. He defines that as "damage to your deeply held beliefs about right and wrong. It might be caused by something that you do or fail to do, or by something that is done to you – but either way it breaks that sense of moral certainty."
Contrary to widely held assumptions, it is not the fear and the terror that service members endure in the battlefield that inflicts most psychological damage, Nash has concluded, but feelings of shame and guilt related to the moral injuries they suffer. Top of the list of such injuries, by a long shot, is when one of their own people is killed."
This concept of 'moral injury' seems highly persuasive to me. Do others feel similarly or do others wish to provide a different analysis? For those so persuaded, do you see any extension of this phenomenon into other perhaps more apparently mundane aspects of life?
"For William Nash, a retired Navy psychiatrist who directed the marine corps' combat stress control programme, William Busbee's [a young soldier whose mental distress and suicide provides the human focus of the article] described expressions of torment are all too familiar. He has worked with hundreds of service members who have been grappling with suicidal thoughts, not least when he was posted to Fallujah in Iraq during the height of the fighting in 2004.
He and colleagues in military psychiatry have developed the concept of "moral injury" to help understand the current wave of self-harm. He defines that as "damage to your deeply held beliefs about right and wrong. It might be caused by something that you do or fail to do, or by something that is done to you – but either way it breaks that sense of moral certainty."
Contrary to widely held assumptions, it is not the fear and the terror that service members endure in the battlefield that inflicts most psychological damage, Nash has concluded, but feelings of shame and guilt related to the moral injuries they suffer. Top of the list of such injuries, by a long shot, is when one of their own people is killed."
This concept of 'moral injury' seems highly persuasive to me. Do others feel similarly or do others wish to provide a different analysis? For those so persuaded, do you see any extension of this phenomenon into other perhaps more apparently mundane aspects of life?
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