A New Theory of PTSD and Veterans: Moral Injury

[MachineGhost]

Now, along with some of the most distinguished doctors in the Department of Veterans Affairs, he believes that moral injury and its sister, traumatic loss, may be the “something”? Panetta is looking for: the leading cause of PTSD, depression, substance abuse, and even the military’s epidemic of suicide. If so, it’s a radical idea. It shifts the focus onto what service members do to others, or in some cases fail to do for each other—not what gets done to them. Perhaps most controversially, it allows for the fact that war itself, no matter how just or good, will leave many of the men who fight it feeling like they’ve dirtied their souls, and perhaps for a simple reason: there is just something about killing that bites the conscience and doesn’t let go. “I don’t want to use it as a crutch,”? former lance corporal Walter Smith, the member of Fox Company who murdered the mother of his children, said in a prison interview in 2008. “But I know for a fact that before I went to Iraq, there’s no way I would have taken somebody else’s life.”?

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2 ... njury.html

[MediumTex]

When I watch those tapes of helicopter pilots in their early 20s in Iraq calmly pulling the trigger on .50 caliber guns that literally turn a human body into a pile of meat in seconds, I can almost feel the agony that they are going to be experiencing in 10, 20 or 30 years.

I think that we are certainly wired to kill each other in self-defense or defense of territory, but I think that highly automated killing in a video game-style environment is not something that most people would be able to cope with over the course of a lifetime.

[RuralEngineer]

The scale of the killing is new too. For millions of years humans wouldn't even meet 150 people in their lifetime. Now we have a single sniper with that many confirmed kills and who knows how many probables.

I sometimes wonder if its universal though or whether there is a difference in the impact of killing to defend yourself or your family and war. Conflict is such a part of the human experience, if there were serious negative consequences for all killing I'd have expected evolution to scrub that part of our psyche by now.

[MediumTex]

The scale of the killing is new too. For millions of years humans wouldn't even meet 150 people in their lifetime. Now we have a single sniper with that many confirmed kills and who knows how many probables.

I sometimes wonder if its universal though or whether there is a difference in the impact of killing to defend yourself or your family and war. Conflict is such a part of the human experience, if there were serious negative consequences for all killing I'd have expected evolution to scrub that part of our psyche by now.

I think that feeling justified in killing is a potent psychological coping technique. 

The problem in a military setting, however, is that you feel totally justified in the moment with your chain of command, military structure and fresh brainwashing-oriented training guiding your actions.

When, however, you get away from the military structure and your mind and personality begin to revert to a more balanced pre-military expression, I think that's when you begin wondering about why you did all those awful things to people who in retrospect may have just been defending their homes or their countries from an invading or occupying force.

I think that this is what creates the conditions for bad PTSD--i.e., the realization that you did something horrible and you have no way of justifying it to yourself that helps to ease the pain.

I regret every bit of pain that I have inflicted on others in my life.  Most of the pain I feel justified in having administered, and that keeps the regret from being painful, but some of it I don't feel justified in having administered and that can really bother me if I dwell on it, and I am only talking about comparatively very minor stuff compared to turning another human being into a pile of meat.

Some people can inflict injury or death on others and it doesn't bother them too much, but I think that such people are always at risk of many other mental health disorders, since a healthy sense of empathy is part of what allows us to live among others successfully.