I’m conducting research on moral injury in education for a graduate school project. I’m seeking responses from current and former K-12 educators. Educators is inclusive—can be current or former teachers, paraeducators, administrators, counselors, social workers, etc.. Below is an anonymous link and the survey takes between 5-10 minutes to complete. I appreciate your help!
https://uiowa.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_7OGQv5M6T8Bipls?Q_CHL=social&Q_SocialSource=reddit
Succession would be a good teaching example for the concept of "moral injury." Key work in this area relates to the experience of Vietnam veterans. In addition to the familiar idea of PTSD, extended combat can lead to moral injury involving what Jonathan Shay, in "Achilles in Vietnam" calls "the undoing of character." Because these vets saw repeated violations of "what's right" by their own leadership (and their fellow "grunts"), they lose their own sense of trust, love, values, etc. The literally have their character terribly damaged if not destroyed. For some years, this concept of moral injury has been extended to other situations, including victims of repeated and severe child abuse. It makes sense that if your parents abuse you (physically/emotionally/verbally) and you see them behave very badly, your character either never really develops, or is undone. That's the Roy sibs. To what extent they have flashes of actual human warmth and caring, it would be due to some kind of relationships as they grew up that partly offset the moral injury at the hands of the abusive parents.
For years, I was obsessed with work. I spent tens of thousands on grad school, got the best internship, and spent all my free time going to conferences, networking, developing a niche, and reading about how to be better at my job.
Then I got what was supposed to be a dream job. The work itself was good, but the managers decided to pay us near-poverty wages while demanding we output about 4x as much work as we should have been. Plus management was committing a bunch of crimes, but I didn't really care because they didn't involve me. The issue was I couldn't do my job properly, was asked to be unethical to our customers every day, and started to hate it.
I lasted the longest of my team of 10 people, but one day hit a serious wall. Could not take it anymore. I stopped doing the BS they asked us to do and started doing meaningful work at a reasonable pace. Understandably I was fired.
Then I spent a year on UI, oddly more financially stable than while working (probably because of no commute, health insurance, or student loan payment bills, plus SNAP.) Actually being a human instead of a worker. Making friends. Life was great. Then I had a part-time job, then I got more employment from the pandemic.
Now I have a GOOD job, one that is pretty much non-abusive. But the problem is stuck with me.
I now hate work. I now think every time someone assigns me something, they're testing to see if they can step all over me. I instinctively push back because I assume every employer is evil. I do not flow naturally into productivity since I equate production with abuse. I feel terrible for my new employer because they didn't do anything wrong.
It has been 3 years and I don't see how I could ever again do a job, even a good one, for more than a few hours a day. I feel like sticking it out with the abusive employer didn't make me stronger at all, but just traumatized. I really thought I could be really great at my field but just 10 months of getting professionally taken advantage of turned me into a defensive, entitled loser.
SUMMARY OF ARTICLE
This is an article about exclusion. We might not like to admit it – even fail to realise it – but National Health Service (NHS) mental health service structures have become increasingly focused on how to deny people care instead of help them to access it. Clinicians learn the art of self-delusion, convincing ourselves we are not letting patients down but, instead, doing the clinically appropriate thing. Well-meant initiatives become misappropriated to justify neglect. Are we trying to protect ourselves against the knowledge that we're failing our patients, or is collusion simply the easiest option? Problematic language endemic in psychiatry reveals a deeper issue: a culture of fear and falsehood, leading to iatrogenic harm. An excessively risk-averse and under-resourced system may drain its clinicians of compassion, losing sight of the human being behind each ‘protected’ bed and rejected referral.
Further reading: Magical thinking and moral injury: exclusion culture in psychiatry | BJPsych Bulletin
You can find the PDF version of it directly above the word 'Abstract'
A RESPONSE FROM A SURVIVOR
The British Journal of Psychiatry will never be on my reading list but in September it featured an article which deserves your urgent attention. The article was remarkable since written by a consultant psychiatrist. Dr Chloe Beale suggested that mental health services may be designed to keep service users out.
In the concluding paragraph, Dr Beale writes: Patients and carers have been speaking out about exclusion and iatrogenic harm for too long; psychiatrists complaining about blame culture similarly. It is time this was translated into action by those with most power to effect change.(1)
I want to respond to that unexpected article with a survivor’s account of service exclusion. No words can do justice to the hurt and damage caused by a label of ‘emotionally unstable personality disorder’ (EUPD) and subsequent rejection by statutory mental health services.
Further reading: Section Zero (indefinite exclusion) - NSUN website
A TWITTER THREAD ABOUT THE ARTICLES (STARTED BY WRITER FIRST ARTICLE)
*Link:
... keep reading on reddit ➡Hello mates, I have a question related to law and court decisions in Brazil. I live in Russia and here animals are considered a property. Obviously, property can't receive any compensation for themselves. Since I don't live in Brazil, it is much harder to get truthful and non fake information about what's going on there. I browsed the Net and found out that The Paraná Court of Appeals recently (September 2021) made a decision according to which dogs named Spike and Rambo received something around 2 000 R$ as a compensation for moral injury.
I would like to receive some comments from you, maybe a bit of explanation according to Brazil law, and, if there's one, a link to the court decision (Russian court decisions mostly available online. Truthful sources links to proof what you say would be nice as well! Thanks a lot in advance.
I found some publications in the Net according to this situation:
There also was a publication on the website "O Antagonista" with more information relating to the subject, but I couldn't find it since there's some kind of subscription to gain access to the publication.
If I should go elsewhere to find my answer, would be very nice of you to give me a link to some Brazilian lawyers forums etc.
I've been searching for some reason, something that has caused so many of us to be burnt out, miserable, searching for the exits. In my rumination, I remembered reading a paper about Moral Injury in soldiers which these authors define as "as perpetrating, failing to prevent, or bearing witness to acts that transgress deeply held moral beliefs and expectations may be deleterious in the long-term, emotionally, psychologically, behaviorally, spiritually, and socially " (https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.1083.7546&rep=rep1&type=pdf). Now, I'm not here to gatekeep trauma or argue for who had it worse, but this definition certainly struck a chord with me. Who among us hasn't had to trangress their morals a little bit in teaching. After the virtual years, and the attack on teaching, and the feral-ness of the kids, is it possible we are all seeing this moral injury finally start to affect us? Unfortunately, I have no real solutions to how to deal with this.
According to Wikipedia:
> The concept of moral injury emphasizes the psychological, social, cultural, and spiritual aspects of trauma. Distinct from psychopathology, moral injury is a normal human response to an abnormal traumatic event. According to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, the concept is used in literature with regard to the mental health of military veterans who have witnessed or perpetrated an act in combat that transgressed their deeply held moral beliefs and expectations. Among healthcare professionals, moral injury refers to unaddressed moral distress leading to the accumulation of serious inner conflict that may overwhelm one's sense of goodness and humanity. It is important to note that, despite the identification of moral traumas among both veterans and healthcare professionals, research has remained oddly independent between these two groups, and as such, the terminology is not uniform.
Bit surprised at that last bit: you'd think Medics would be big point of overlap, and that generally caregivers that look after military personnel would see both sides?
Man, I don't envy medics. The gruesome stuff they see... enough to make anyone wonder "what's it all for?"
There have been a lot of journalists who have been quitting due to burnout and that has at least started some conversation on reducing burnout. Reducing workloads, giving writers control, discussing mental health at work etc.
But the main thing that burnt me out of my last staff writing job was definitely the lack of journalistic integrity from the editors.
I obsessed over being a good journalist. I got two degrees in it leaving me in endless, crippling debt. I got a high-ranked internship, a good fellowship, and developed a strong beat. All I ever talked about was journalism, how important it is, networking, and my beat.
Then I accepted a staff job in NYC at $39,000 a year at a big-name, highly respected old company. Wasn't happy about the pay but it's ok because bringing the truth to the people is so important to me.
But I eventually realized that the bosses and my editor didn't actually care about the truth. They put headlines on my articles that were BS. They insisted that I put pictures and videos on every article from a very small selection of media, so they constantly had irrelevant and misleading pics and vids. Every person on my team except me got blasted by hundreds of people on Twitter, including Donald Trump, for the technically-true-but-intentionally-misleading headlines. They asked us to pitch, write, edit, build in CMS, workshop the hed, and more for five articles per person per day, leaving us zero minutes to fact check. I don't even need validation that it was crap, everyone knew it and the vast majority of the newsroom quit.
This was at a time when journalism was very much under fire, so much that someone murdered a bunch of journalists because he didn't like the "fake news" they were writing. (The news was true.) I wanted so badly to defend journalism, and I'll defend the writers, but journalism-haters were sort of right. Our trusted name became a clickbait factory, diluting the reliability of the whole industry. And I was part of it, being forced to re-write news that someone else covered, trying to make pieces with more information but not being allowed the time to get that information, and frequently had either false headlines stuck on my stuff, or I had to spend all my emotional energy negotiating down the number of errors in the hed.
I sacrificed so much for that job in the hopes that I could bring some truth to the people. I missed my sister's wedding because they insisted they needed insane amounts of content, even whe
... keep reading on reddit ➡
I do not know why my therapist will not communicate with me any longer. We were seperared by the virus and a non-supportive family. He did help me understand the difference between PTSD and "moral injury." At least I think I have it right. I asked him to please not leave me hanging and thought he would be impressed when I told him I have put my family on the side and was ready to move on. At one point, I even said that I know I will not survive this. Too me now it seems "normal."
AUTHOR: JOSHUA PEDERSON
Sin Sick: Moral Injury in War and Literature (Cornell University Press , 2021)
https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501755880/sin-sick/#bookTabs=1
https://www.amazon.com/Sin-Sick-Moral-Injury-Literature-ebook/dp/B08LZZTL7M
Any suggestions would be much appreciated.
So far, "moral injury" seems to be capture much of it. From Wikipedia:
>Brett Litz and colleagues define moral injury as ***"perpetrating, failing to prevent, bearing witness to, or learning about acts that transgress deeply held moral beliefs and expectations."***[2]
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Litz and colleagues focus on the cognitive, behavioral, and emotional aspects of moral injury, positing that cognitive dissonance **occurs after a perceived moral transgression resulting in stable internal global attributions of blame, followed by the experience of shame, guilt, or anxiety, causing the individual to withdraw from others.[2] The result is increased risk of suicide due to demoralization, self-harming, and self-handicapping behaviors.[2]
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Psychological risk factors which make an individual more prone to moral injury include neuroticism and shame-proneness. Protective factors include self-esteem, forgiving supports, and belief in the just-world hypothesis.[2]
