2025/10/02 by B Campbell, Tourna N. Khan, Sinan S. Anwar +2 · 1 voice
Health Professions · Psychology · #Healthcare professionals’ stress and burnout #Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Research #Resilience and Mental Health
paper · doi:10.1080/15555240.2025.2568877
Research suggests that moral injury (i.e., perpetrating, witnessing, or failing to prevent acts that transgress one’s moral beliefs, values, or ethics) is associated with a range of adverse psychological sequelae among military-connected populations, including suicidality. However, little is known about how moral injury is associated with suicidality among healthcare workers or if these associations differ by gender. We collected self-reported data from a sample of United States healthcare workers (N = 200), including a modified Moral Injury Events Scale and items related to suicidality (i.e., past-year suicide thoughts, suicide plans, suicide attempts). We examined the cross-sectional relationships between moral injury and these measures of suicidality using separate logistic regression models and examined for differences by gender. Greater moral injury was significantly associated with higher odds of past-year suicidal thoughts (aOR = 1.05, 95% CI: 1.01, 1.09) and associated with suicide planning (aOR = 1.06, 95% CI: 1.00, 1.12) and suicide attempt at a trend-level (aOR = 1.07, 95% CI: 0.99, 1.16). There were no statistically significant differences in these associations by gender. Results suggest that suicidal thoughts, plans, and attempts of healthcare workers may be driven, in part, by morally injurious events experienced in the workplace.