%0 Journal Article
%T On ¡®moral injury¡¯:  Psychic fringes and war violence
%A Kenneth MacLeish
%J History of the Human Sciences
%@ 1461-720X
%D 2018
%R 10.1177/0952695117750342
%X This article is concerned with theories and therapeutic practices that interpret post-traumatic combat stress as a ¡®moral injury¡¯ produced by the shock of carrying out lethal violence in uncertain battlefield conditions. While moral injury is said to share many symptoms with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), its proponents ¨C military and Veterans Health Administration clinical psychologists, chaplains, and some psychiatrists ¨C are concerned by PTSD¡¯s inability to account for the meaning-based moral and ethical distress that counterinsurgency battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan are allegedly especially prone to produce in US soldiers. Moral injury theorists seem to want to describe a phenomenon that is both more profound than PTSD but which, as clinical psychologists Shira Maguen and Brett Litz state, is not itself a mental disorder. In this article, I examine the links between moral injury theory¡¯s fringe diagnostic status and the fringe status of the kinds of violence it understands as uniquely injurious to soldiers¡¯ psyches. Moral injury valorizes war-fighting and military culture while casting war as a source of almost inevitable psychopathology. I argue that moral injury theory represents an effort to carve out a distinct domain of psychological expertise but also a negotiation of the tension between war violence¡¯s ¡®normal¡¯ practice and its excessive or morally hazardous manifestations ¨C both of which link mental illness directly to the politics of war violence and post-war care
%K military mental health
%K moral distress
%K moral injury
%K post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)
%K war violence
%U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0952695117750342