I “knew” Edna Foa before I met Edna Foa, as one does when the person you are talking about is as renowned, as scholarly, as influential in one’s field of study as she was and will remain even after her passing.
Over the years, working with service members, veterans, and their families, I’ve learned that some forms of distress can feel confusing and overwhelming until someone finally gives them a name. For many people, moral injury is one of those experiences. Many trauma reactions are rooted in fear and survival. Moral injury is different. It occurs when what we have seen, done, or been unable to prevent conflicts with our deeply held values—our sense of what is right and who we believe ourselves to be.
Feeling fatigued is not the same as feeling tired. Our society uses the word “tired” to mean so many different things to the point that most people don’t know that fatigue is something different. This can be a point of frustration for many people who experience chronic fatigue due to medical issues. Being told yet again that you just need more sleep and possibly treatment for insomnia can lead patients to believe there isn’t help, or at least that providers are clueless. Understanding that there is a difference between tiredness and fatigue is critical, and we need to be doing a better job understanding and assessing for this.
In this blog, Dr. Rogers reviews a congressional report on sleep deprivation from the Department of Defense (2021) and subsequent Government Accountability Office report published in 2024. The blog highlights an upcoming Sleep Summit that focuses on the issues raised by these reports, as well as ways to learn about and participate in the upcoming summit.
I have served on the Military Child and Family Collaboratory, here at the Center for Deployment Psychology for almost four years now. A part of that work has been the valuable insights that I have gained from, providers, policy makers, advocates and families at our bi-annual convening events. One common theme is that our military families are often described as resilient, even as military youth face unique circumstances and navigate settings and situations marked by constant change. Hearing this theme repeated led me to look more closely at how resilience is supported and defined within military families.