Measuring Moral Injury and Treatment Response in Justice-Involved Veterans: Development and Validation of a New Moral Injury Scale

With the explosion of Veteran Treatment Courts throughout the United States in the past decade has come more research into the effects of combat on justice-involved military service members. Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is well known and widely researched, but moral injury has emerged as an important concept in treating veterans, especially those with combat exposure. Interestingly, recent neuroimaging research has shown that PTSD and moral injury are related but distinct conditions. To explore these distinctions, psychologists and researchers at the Center for Post Traumatic Growth developed an instrument to explore moral injury and the role it plays in recovery from trauma. In collaboration with one of the longest-running felony Veteran Treatment Courts in the nation, the Moral Injury Scale (MIS) was administered at two points in time to more than 100 justice-involved veterans. Relationships between moral injury and other conditions were also examined. This article explores the primary components of the MIS, the validation of the scale, and the relationship of moral injury to other variables in a justice-involved veterans sample.