Structured Interview With Military Officers Who Participated in Combat Actions With Signs of Moral Trauma

Abstract

Soldiers at war are required to make the most important, intense, and difficult moral decisions of their lives. However, not every serviceman is able to carry out these decisions. As a result, many combatants suffer from lasting shame, anger, alienation, loss of religious beliefs, and other effects that are now called moral trauma. Available scientific approaches to understanding moral trauma and restoring the mental health of servicemen who were participants in morally traumatic events are summarized. An algorithm for conducting a structured interview has been developed, which involves the following stages: notation and reconstruction of the event, description of experiences, experiences and thoughts; determination of remote consequences of the event and prospects for the development of changes in himself, which the serviceman himself sees; determination of resources; searching for a basis for self-healing. At various stages of recovery of mental health, a serviceman not only finds the meaning of the suffering experienced, but also realizes how to use his own experience based on his psychological knowledge in the future, learns techniques (breathing, neurolinguistic programming, etc.) to overcome the negative symptoms of moral trauma and post-traumatic stress stress disorder. They achieve an understanding of the existing connection between the event and the destruction itself, form an idea of the normality of one's own imperfection and the need to forgive oneself or atone for guilt in a constructive way. It was determined that the proposed structured interview essentially serves as a step-by-step instruction for psychologists when conducting measures to restore and preserve the mental health of military personnel participating in hostilities.