Joseph M. Currier
Moral injuryPotentially morally injurious event
in Moral injury
American clinical psychologist (PhD), Professor of Psychology at the University of South Alabama and Director of its PhD program in combined clinical and counseling psychology. Earlier postdoctoral work at the National Center for PTSD's Pacific Islands Division with Kent Drescher, where the moral-injury measurement programme began. Veteran-focused clinical research has been the through-line of his career.
Stake§
Currier writes from inside the VA / National Center for PTSD research apparatus, with the same institutional location as Litz and the same methodological commitments — psychometric validation, factor analysis, treatment-trial evidence. The stake is technical: he is the field's principal measurement architect, and his instruments have to satisfy the standards of Clinical Psychology Review and the VA's evidence-based-treatment review process.
Currier is first author on the 2013/2015 Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy paper that introduced the Moral Injury Questionnaire — Military Version (MIQ-M), the first psychometrically validated self-report instrument for the construct. He is also a co-author on the 2019 validation of the Expressions of Moral Injury Scale — Military Version — Short Form (EMIS-M-SF), which became the standard instrument in post-2020 clinical-research papers.
Within the field he is the figure who built the measurement infrastructure. The instruments are not neutral — they encode the Litz-style definition of moral injury (the potentially morally injurious event) rather than Shay's betrayal-by-authority framing — and the methodological disagreements between the clinical and theological strands of the literature show up partly as disagreements about whether the MIQ-M is measuring the right thing.