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Kate Wand's avatar

This is such a great read. Reminds of me of Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment. And of course it took an outsider to point out that he was complicit in the institutional abuse—- and that it was his individual choice that mattered!

Craig M. Williams's avatar

The wound is real, but if it needs an audience more than healing, eventually you have to ask what you participated in, what you stayed quiet about, and whether the story is moving you forward or keeping you in the same place.

Love's avatar

Like using LinkedIn isn’t moral injury enough. 🙃🔥🤣💕

Trysa Shulman's avatar

🔥

Nathalie Martinek PhD's avatar

I see what you did there!

Camden McDaris Black's avatar

We get caught up a lot in this in my field, especially in larger institutions. As you mention, even growing passive can feed into this self-fulfilling destructive cycle. For me, the only cure was to extract myself altogether from the environment.

Nathalie Martinek PhD's avatar

Smart move @Camden McDaris Black. Extraction out of these institutional cultures that honour victimhood and not accountability is a sanity saver.

Caroline's avatar

One of your most profound pieces, Dr Natalie. Thank you....

Kate Wand's contributory link to the Zimbardo experiment is so relevant for me... Thank you, Kate.

I first learned about Zimbardo's work whilst studying my sociology o levels as a teenager. It opened my eyes, gave me anchors for further understanding, changed me profoundly, resulted in an exceptional grade for that O level. And set the path for where I am today....

Insightful, healing, enriching....

Many thanks to all on this list,

Caroline 🙂🙏

The Postmortem Report's avatar

“The popular discourse amputated that dimension because victimhood generates engagement” is the most forensically precise line in this piece. The moral injury industry did to suffering exactly what the M&M Conference does to medical error: it created a documentation system that processes the wound without examining the conditions that produced it. The discourse protects the injury because the injury is the product. Healing would kill the business model.

G Raghuram's avatar

I am not sure enough attention is paid to this - but "values" themselves are extremely amorphous and contingent. And the true test of what they might mean in any given situation also arises in such testing conditions. The thing is that a lot of these issues devolve down into the kinds of difficulties that exist with the so-called "reasonable man" or "beyond reasonable doubt" issue in law and jurisprudence. It's also a deeply complex philosophical problem - testing for consistency. And assessing it as good enough.