Source: click here Dr. William Gibson and I co-authored this article. He is a psychologist and neuropsychologist at the VA Medical Center in Canandaigua, NY. It's not a new phenomenon for a politician to use someone's suffering for political gain, but Sarah Palin, in addressing her son's arrest last week for domestic violence, has managed both to propagate a series of misunderstandings about PTSD and to dishonor veterans. In addition, she demonstrated the worst way for famili

Even on the short overnight ops, sometimes we talked about things we knew we'd carry home. On a cold night in March 2010, Jeff brought up the kid he'd shot a month earlier, when the battle for the Afghan city of Marjah was hot and there was no shortage of 15-year-olds picking up Kalashnikovs off the ground. Jeff had killed one of them with four shots from a heavy-caliber semi-auto that made a soft thud when the bolt released. The kid had a rifle, and even kids with rifles can

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED ARTICLE!!! Many veterans face an injury that goes largely unacknowledged — but journalist David Wood is bringing it to the forefront. "I think that almost everyone who returns from war has suffered some kind of moral injury," Wood tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "And I do not mean by that that they have done something wrong — only that they have seen or experienced things, which violate their own sense of who they are, their own sense of right and wrong, the

A Moral Injury A moral injury wounds the soul. By: Eric Newhouse January 31, 2013 For years, I’ve argued that PTSD is really two very different disorders, improperly lumped together as one by the American Psychiatric Association in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). The first, of course, is the fear of being killed which manifests itself in hypervigilance, vivid nightmaresand flashbacks. It’s about what others have tried to do to you. But the sec

The Moral Injury of War: Using ‘Soul Repair’ to Prevent Veteran Suicides The difficult process of repairing a soldier’s moral conscience begins with a societal approach to compassionate care—a commitment to addressing war veterans’ moral anguish as well as PTSD. March 2013 By Rita Nakashima Brock and Gabriella Lettini In “Soul Repair,” Rita Nakashima Brock and Gabriella Lettini tell the stories of four veterans of wars from Vietnam to our current conflicts in Iraq and Afghani