Piecing it Together: Collaborative Group Care for Moral Injury

Integrative Mental Health (IMH), a program office in the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) devoted to advancing integrated mental health and spiritual care, was coincidentally launched the same year that moral injury was introduced into the scientific literature. Given the psychological, social, and spiritual dynamics operative within moral injury, IMH has devoted substantial attention to how mental health professionals and chaplains can collaborate in the care of moral injury, especially as part of co-led groups. This review provides a rationale, history, and overview of ways that IMH has approached moral injury work in VA.

This review covers how IMH is “piecing together” moral injury efforts in three ways: 1) facilitating mental health professionals and chaplains collaboratively working together; 2) encouraging veterans with moral injury coming together in the context of groups to care for themselves and one another; and 3) piecing together research, clinical quality improvement projects, and community engagement efforts within IMH to mutually inform and enhance each other.

By engaging multiple disciplines, perspectives, care paradigms, and investigative lenses on moral injury, IMH has sought to cultivate richly layered understandings of moral injury and attending approaches to care.