The shaping of moral injury among UK military veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq

Abstract

Objective: Research on "moral injury" -the psychological wound experienced by military personnel and other "functionaries" whose moral values are violated -has proliferated in recent years. Many psychological researchers, including those in the UK, have subscribed to an increasingly individualised operationalisation of moral injury, with medicalised criteria that closely mirrors PTSD. This trend carries assumptions that have not been comprehensively verified by empirical research. This study aims to explore UK military veterans' experiences of, and challenges to, their moral values in relation to their deployment experiences, without prematurely foreclosing exploration of wider systemic influences.Method: Twelve UK military veterans who served in Afghanistan and/or Iraq were interviewed, and the data was analysed thematically and reflexively. Results: Three interrelated themes were generated: 1)"you've been undermined", 2)"how am I involved in this?", and 3)"civilianised". Conclusions: The analysis suggests that several assumptions privileged in moral injury research may be empirically contradicted, at least in relation to the experiences of UK military veterans. These assumptions include that moral injury: is exclusively driven by individual, episodic acts of commission and omission, invariably leads to guilt, and necessarily bifurcates into variants of either perpetration or betrayal. Instead, participants understood the moral violations they experienced as socially contingent. Rather than "treating" moral injury as a disorder of thinking and feeling located within an individual, the sociallycontextualised understanding of moral injury indicated by this study's findings may prompt the development of psychological and social interventions that understand moral injury as the fallout of what occurs between people and within systems.