Moral Injury and the Call to Recovery

Unlike ordinary mistakes and errors that result in injury, and different from the painful but mundane interpersonal betrayals of trust in everyday life, moral injury captures the experience of institutional manipulation of beliefs and behaviors to coerce individuals into actions they ultimately find morally objectionable. As the harms of the gender affirming model for youth gender dysphoria become clearer, growing numbers of mental health professionals face the deeply challenging cognitive, emotional, and social experience of moral injury related to their own manipulated or coerced complicity with experimental medical interventions. Denial, remorse, regret, shame, rage, fear, and frustration characterize this emotional landscape, along with deep and haunting questions about trust, institutional integrity, security, risk-taking, repair, forgiveness, compassion and safe-guarding. The work of therapists who have discovered themselves unwittingly complicit in practices that have resulted in harm intersects with the needs of parents, other professionals, and survivors. In this presentation, Amber Ault will explore the challenge of moral injury to therapists, both as they experience their own complicity in patient harm and support others who have experienced moral injury. The mental health profession must face its significant role in the moral injury experienced by clinicians in the field, as well as its considerable capacity to promote repair, healing, and professional right action moving forward.

Amber Ault is a writer and interdisciplinary social scientist who studied the history of homophobia and sexism in psychiatric diagnoses during a National Institute of Mental Health postdoctoral fellowship. Her clinical work focuses on supporting survivors of narcissistic abuse and her writing has been published in various academic journals including Social Work and The Sociological Quarterly. She is part of a growing number of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans adults highlighting concerns about the medicalization of gender non-conforming children and adolescents.

Therapy First has been approved by NBCC as an Approved Continuing Education Provider,
ACEP No. 7505. Programs that do not qualify for NBCC credit are clearly identified. Therapy
First is solely responsible for all aspects of the programs. This webinar provide 1.5 hours of CE credits.