Wars, pandemics, and the human mind: Competing conceptions of trauma in the 21st century

September 11, 2001, was a turning point in the history and science of trauma. Following the terrorist attack, the United States expected mass trauma and mounted the largest mental-health disaster response in history. But the mass trauma never occurred. Most survivors reported few or no symptoms of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder or other forms of mental illness, and influential psychologists began to argue that it was time to rethink how the human mind responds to violence and tragedy.

This turning point in the history of trauma calls for careful analysis. After 9/11, psychologists became convinced that they had underestimated human ‘resilience,’ often defined as the ability to maintain or ‘bounce back’ to one’s normal level of functioning after a traumatic event. But as the subsequent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan deteriorated, other psychologists stressed that the emotional impact of trauma was not just about fear, grief, and exhaustion, which people can eventually bounce back from—there was also a moral quality to many soldiers’ distress, characterized by guilt, shame, and self-contempt. This form of harm to the self could come from having perpetrated or failed to prevent atrocities, from having been betrayed by one’s leaders, or from having violated one’s own basic ideals. Psychologists called it ‘moral injury.’ This concept has recently travelled to civilian healthcare, where moral injury is seen as an effect of an overwhelmed system, unable to provide adequate care. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the BBC reported that first responders were now ‘at risk of moral injury,’ while the American Psychiatric Association warned ‘that “moral injury” is an emerging consequence of this pandemic.’

The project explores how and why the concepts of resilience and moral injury emerged, how they travelled from a military context to a civilian one, and how they are reshaping the science and politics of trauma today. The project consists of three case studies. The first looks at how ideas about resilience and moral injury have influenced the American mental-health establishment’s thinking and policy on trauma since 9/11 in both the military and civilian domain. The second case study explores how the professional response to trauma has evolved in the Danish military, from the peacekeeping missions of the 1990s to the post-9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The third case study analyzes the militarized health response to COVID-19, the politics of mental health in civilian healthcare during times of crisis, and the emotional impact of the pandemic on front-line responders in the United Kingdom.

The project runs from 2022-2024 and is carried out by senior researcher Johannes Lang and postdocs Cora Salkovskis and Lars Williams. The project is funded by the Carlsberg Foundation.