Mad Studies, Disability Studies, and the Medicalization of Moral Injury

A consistent question in the study of moral injury is whether it should be treated as a medical condition, and a consistent focus of mad studies and disability studies is the downsides of medicalization. Despite this, moral injury has largely not been analyzed through the lens of disability. Taking Tyler Boudreau’s paradigmatic argument against the medicalization of moral injury as a starting point, this paper argues that the insights of mad studies and disability studies provide strong additions to the argument against this medicalization. As Boudreau argues, psychiatry tends to privatize discussions of moral injury and avoid real political or ethical grappling with the conditions that lead to moral injury; medicine similarly privatizes and depoliticizes the social conditions that create disability. Psychiatrized people are also discredited as knowers, which excludes the insights of veterans with moral injury from public discourse.