Addressing Religious and Spiritual Diversity in Moral Injury Care: Five Perspectives

Abstract  Purpose of ReviewMoral injury is increasingly recognized as a problem across various populations. Moral injury symptoms can occur when an individual ’s action, lack of action, or witness of an event violates their moral beliefs, and include dysphoric emotions such as guilt, shame, and disgust; loss of meaning and purpose; withdrawal from valued relationships and groups; and religious/spiritual struggle (e.g., feeling abandoned or punished by t he divine, loss of faith in a previously held belief system). Spiritually oriented moral injury interventions are sometimes delivered by mental health clinicians, chaplains, other religious/spiritual leaders, and peers. However, there is a lack of research on moral injury interventions among diverse religious/spiritual populations.Recent FindingsTo start bridging this gap, we present anonymized moral injury case studies from the perspectives of five spiritual traditions (listed alphabetically): Agnosticism, Islam, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS, also known as Mormonism), Native American spiritual ways, and Roman Catholicism. These case studies describe the morally injurious event(s), ensuing mental health problems and religious/spiritual struggles, how these struggles are understood within the specific religious/spiritual tradition, and interventions and resources used to address moral injury.SummaryWe discuss resources for religious/spiritual competency training, religiously/spiritually oriented psych...
Source: Current Treatment Options in Psychiatry - Category: Psychiatry Source Type: research