Beyond PTSD: Soldiers Have Injured Souls

Healing the soul of the veteran is what Point Man International Ministries has been doing this work since 1984.

Beyond PTSD: Soldiers Have Injured Souls
Now that modern militaries accept that war creates psychological trauma, therapists wonder about its toll on the spirit.
By Diane Silver

“They have lost their sense that virtue is even possible,” Shay says. “It corrodes the soul.”

John Fisher got his soul back when he visited a cemetery in Greece.

Shelley Corteville felt “rocketed” into healing when she told her story at a veterans’ retreat after 28 years of silence.

Bob Cagle lost his decades-long urge to commit suicide after an encounter at a Buddhist temple.
These veterans and thousands like them grapple with what some call “the war after the war” — the psychological scars of conflict. Working with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and private organizations, these men and women are employing treatments both radically new and centuries old. At the center of their journey is a new way of thinking that redefines some traumas as moral injuries.

The psychological toll taken by war is obvious. For the second year in a row, more active-duty troops committed suicide in 2010 (468) than were killed in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan (462). A 2008 RAND Corporation study reported that nearly 1 in 5 troops who had returned from Iraq and Afghanistan reported symptoms of post-traumatic stress or major depression.

Since the American Psychiatric Association added post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, to its diagnostic manual in 1980, the diagnosis has most often focused on trauma associated with threats to a soldier’s life. Today, however, therapists such as Jonathan Shay, a retired VA psychiatrist and recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant; Edward Tick, director of the private group Soldier’s Heart; and Brett Litz, a VA psychologist, argue that this concept is too limited.

What sometimes happens in war may more accurately be called a moral injury — a deep soul wound that pierces a person’s identity, sense of morality and relationship to society. In short, a threat in a solder’s life.

Neither the military, VA nor the American Psychiatric Association have sanctioned this as a diagnosis, but the concept is gaining traction. In April, psychologists, officers and chaplains led a plenary session on the topic at the Navy and Marine Corps Combat and Operational Stress Control Conference in San Diego.
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