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New Study Aims to Improve Treatment for Veterans' Mental Health
New Study Aims to Improve Treatment for Veterans' Mental Health
The attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, and the ensuing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, heralded in a new concept affecting our combat and support military personnel. This concept is known today as moral injury. Military personnel were already familiar with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), whether from personal experience or from reading and training on the subject, but no training addresses the prevalence or effects of moral injury. The term moral injury (MI) was first coined by psychiatrist Jonathan Shay and his colleagues based on feedback from military and veteran patients in 1998; however, it remains that practitioners fail to differentiate moral injury from PTSD. The question being answered is to what extent Veterans with PTSD also have instances of MI. To this end, this study aimed to examine a group of at least 169 combat and non-combat U.S. military Veterans who were diagnosed with PTSD to determine the difference in prevalence of MI among demographic groups. To accomplish this, a demographic questionnaire and two standardized assessment instruments were administered: (1) the Moral Injury Outcome Scale (MIOS); and (2) the PTSD Checklist for DSM-V (PCL-5).
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