Trauma: Conflict and Aftermath

FAIN: AC-234283-16

University of the Incarnate Word (San Antonio, TX 78209-6318)
Frederick Zenon Culverhouse (Project Director: June 2015 to February 2021)

A series of faculty and curriculum development activities on the subject of trauma.

This project looks at Trauma and its Aftermath through an interdisciplinary humanities focusing on three populations 1) Veterans of War; 2) Refugees and 3) Sexual Violence Victims. While usually the province of the clinical sciences, the complexity of trauma induced through intentional violence increasingly requires a humanities perspective to add to the analysis. University of the Incarnate Word will enhance the undergraduate humanities curriculum by implementing new courses and embedding service learning opportunities within new and existing courses with a focus on psychological trauma. A faculty cohort led by the PI will receive development via readings and invited lecturers each spring, develop curriculum in the summer, and then implement and evaluation new courses each fall semester of the project period. At the end of the three-year project, a conference will be held highlighting student and faculty work and research in this area.

Associated Products

Trauma Track within Medical Humanities Minor (Course or Curricular Material)
Title: Trauma Track within Medical Humanities Minor
Author: Emily Clark (professor and grant cohort member)
Author: Zenon Culverhouse
Abstract: Trauma Studies Minor, a track that stems from the proposed Medical Humanities Minor, housed in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. CHASS faculty is uniquely positioned to understand and lead transformative work in the rapidly growing area of trauma studies. Currently existing programs in trauma studies world-wide focus exclusively on psychological and psychiatric approaches. The multi-disciplinary, intersectional approach to Trauma Studies that has emerged from the grant work at UIW will be unique in that it leverages the scholarship and deep expertise across several disciplines to work together to share knowledge, develop innovative ways to address trauma, and to share these findings with our local community as well as with academic communities within and outside of UIW. In essence, the trauma track of this minor allows students to develop a broad and nuanced understanding of traumatic experience and, more importantly, apply that knowledge in their careers and daily lives. The trauma track also requires that students complete some of their service hours at an organization that aids traumatized populations (such as combat veterans, immigrants, and victims of sexual or domestic violence).
Year: 2020
Audience: Undergraduate

From Mental Illness to Moral Injury: Psychological and Philosophical Perspectives on the Harm of Sexual Violence (Article)
Title: From Mental Illness to Moral Injury: Psychological and Philosophical Perspectives on the Harm of Sexual Violence
Author: Zenon Culverhouse
Abstract: Since its introduction into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the diagnostic category of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) has dominated public and legal discourse about the harm of sexual violence against women. There is, however, disagreement among some clinical psychologists and philosophers over whether a PTSD diagnosis further harms the victim. Clinical psychologists claim that focusing on a PTSD diagnosis risks undermining a victim’s agency and subjectivity if therapists neglect the victim’s own voice and experiences. Philosophers who acknowledge PTSD in identifying the harm of sexual violence look to victims’ experience of PTSD symptoms rather than how it is used in clinical practice. They conclude that PTSD symptoms are compatible with agency and subjectivity insofar as they help illuminate what it is to be an agent and a subject. I argue that the latter are too optimistic and the former are too pessimistic. An examination of these conflicting views traces the disagreement to unacknowledged discipline-specific boundaries. I conclude with the very tentative suggestion that moral injury could bridge these boundaries.
Year: 2019
Access Model: Open Access
Format: Other
Periodical Title: Analyzing Violence Against Women
Publisher: Springer International

A Bioethics for Global Mental Health. (Article)
Title: A Bioethics for Global Mental Health.
Author: Zenon Culverhouse
Abstract: Global Mental Health (GMH) is a rapidly-growing movement supported by the World Health Organization that aims “to improve treatments… and reduce human rights abuses of people experiencing mental disorders,” particularly among the most vulnerable populations in the global South (Patel, et al. 2014, 3). Because of GMH’s reliance on Western psychiatry, this movement is criticized for engaging in a form of colonialization by imposing Western concepts and treatments of mental disorder on “other” cultures, often on the assumption that local cultural norms of disorder are inferior to the scientifically rigorous concepts of psychiatry. There is, therefore, a great need to reassess the moral principles that guide psychiatric interventions in non-western cultures. Yet bioethics as a profession has paid relatively little attention to mental health, much less to mental health in a global context. In addition, the values of mainstream bioethics are the very values encoded in GMH and criticized by its opponents. I argue that a bioethics for global mental health must avoid the twin horns of colonization and ethical relativism. Proposed solutions from GMH and bioethics are on the right path by incorporating guidelines for culturally-sensitive treatment, but do not go far enough. To make up for this, I utilize the framework of epistemic injustice, which identifies a fundamental harm that other solutions miss, and offers a solution for avoiding it.
Year: 2019
Access Model: Open Access
Format: Other
Periodical Title: In "Global Bioethics and Human Rights"
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

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