Preventing and Treating the Invisible Wounds of War Combat Trauma, Moral Injury, and Psychological Health

This volume provides several perspectives that help practitioners, advocates, and policymakers understand the impact of historical and recent wars on U.S. Military veterans. The chapters address newly recognized conditions, such as moral injury, military sexual trauma, and remote combat trauma as precursors to more serious diagnosable mental health disorders with the goal of addressing how these conditions can be identified and mitigated in future combat operations. The chapters also provide new insights on calculating the costs of wars in terms of dollars spent on treating mental health conditions, the intergenerational impact of combat trauma on families and future generations, and involvement in the criminal justice system of those who do not receive treatment due to discharge characterizations from military misconduct.

Justin T. McDaniel, PhD is an Associate Professor of Public Health in the School of Human Sciences at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. He also has a joint appointments in the Dale and Deborah Smith Center for Alzheimer's Research and trEatment (CARE) and the Department of Population Science and Policy at the Southern Illinois University School of Medicine. His scholarship focuses primarily on important social and behavioral issues faced by military service members and veterans. Evan R. Seamone, LPD, LLM, JD, MS, MPP (U.S. Army, Retired) is a fellow of the National Institute of Military Justice and an advisor to the Veterans Justice Commission of the Council on Criminal Justice. He began teaching law following 12 years of active-duty service in the U.S. Army as a military lawyer having worked extensively in the prosecution and defense of felony cases involving Posttraumatic Stress Disorder and other invisible wounds of war. He worked as a Clinic Attorney at the Veterans Legal Clinic of the Harvard Law School and directed the University of Florida Levin College of Law Veterans and Servicemembers Legal Clinic where he taught law students and supervised them in providing legal services to veterans in need. Stephen N. Xenakis, MD Brigadier General (Retired), United States Army, is a former Erik Erikson Scholar at The Austen Riggs Center, an Anti-Torture Advisor for the Physicians for Human Rights, an Executive Board Member at the University of Pennsylvania Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law, and Adjunct Professor at the Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences.