Some Things Can Never Be Unseen: The Role of Context in Psychological Injury at War
通过对阿富汗军事医疗队的民族志研究，探讨制度背景如何影响战争中的心理伤害，发现无意义感、徒劳感和超现实感等体验根植于文化期望、职业角色和组织规程，威胁人的存在根基。
Recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have reignited debates on how to prevent and manage psychological injury among returning troops. These debates point to the psychological cost of war as a grand challenge whose scale and complexity stretch far beyond the already large and growing number of veterans affected. We use a unique ethnography of a military medical team’s tour of duty in Camp Bastion, Afghanistan, to explore the role of institutional context as a contributing factor to psychological injury from war. We find that exposure to war and its consequences invokes sustained experiences of senselessness, futility, and surreality that are partially rooted in cultural expectations, professional role identity, and organizational protocol, and can threaten people’s existential grounding in this institutional context. We argue that what makes work at war traumatic for some and not others is likely affected by the specific context through which people filter, frame, and cope with their experience. A contextual understanding of psychological injury at war that is based in organizational research can thus form an important part of better addressing this grand challenge.