Edward Tick
in Moral injury
American psychotherapist (PhD), founder and former director of Soldier's Heart, a non-profit retreat-based programme for veterans. Tick began treating Vietnam veterans in 1979, before PTSD existed as a diagnostic category, and his work has stayed outside the VA / DoD clinical-research mainstream — closer to pastoral counselling and cross-cultural ritual practice than to manualised cognitive-behavioural protocols.
Stake§
Tick's stake is openly therapeutic and openly mythopoetic. He argues that the contemporary biomedical frame — PTSD as a discrete disorder treatable by exposure therapy and SSRIs — fundamentally misreads what war does to a person, and that the language and ritual practices for repairing it have to be drawn from older traditions (Greek, Vietnamese, Native American) rather than from the DSM. This is the opposite stake from Litz's clinical-research programme, and Tick's books and trainings occupy the cultural and pastoral end of the field.
Tick's book War and the Soul (Quest Books, 2005) is the most widely-read trade-book account of combat trauma as a soul wound rather than a psychiatric disorder. The book pre-dates the Litz et al. (2009) reformulation but anticipates much of its substantive territory — the centrality of moral and spiritual content in war wounding, the inadequacy of the PTSD frame, the need for community-level repair practices.
Tick's role in the field is partly institutional — he has trained chaplains and clinicians and served as a Department of Defense subject-matter expert on PTSD and moral injury — and partly literary, in that War and the Soul and his later Warrior's Return (2014) became staple texts on syllabi for chaplaincy, pastoral counselling, and veteran-services programmes. He is the voice in the field most closely aligned with the Brock–Lettini Soul Repair project and most distant from the clinical-research programme.