Emily Beaver

Sample AAR Proposals

Communal Rituals as a Source of Individual Healing and Sustained Wellness from Experiences of Mental
Illness and Moral Injury

Abstract:

Experiences of mental illness have risen since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. In the
United States, 2020 brought about a global pandemic, a polarizing presidential election, and racial
division fueled by disproportionate police brutality against African Americans. The disruption of daily
routines and rituals due to the COVID-19 pandemic led to increased experiences of moral injury. Has the
COVID-19 pandemic increased experiences of moral injury, leaving people in the United States grappling
for their collective moral consciousness? Is the increase in mental illness directly correlated to increased
experiences of moral injury within a fractured nation? Defining moral injury as the collapse of frameworks
of the meaning of how people understand society, I propose the need to understand rituals within a
community as a catalyst to shift an individual's healing from a crisis response model to sustained healing
and wellness, addressing both mental illness and moral injury.

Proposal:

Experiences of mental illness have dramatically risen since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in
2020. In the United States, 2020 brought about a global pandemic, a polarizing presidential election cycle,
and racial division fueled by disproportionate police brutality against African Americans. The disruption of
daily routines and rituals due to the COVID-19 pandemic and increased tension in the nation led to
increased experiences of moral injury. Has the COVID-19 pandemic increased experiences of moral injury,
leaving people in the United States grappling for their collective moral consciousness? Across
generations, more individuals seek mental health support. Is this increase in mental illness experiences
directly correlated to increased experiences of moral injury within a fractured nation? Defining moral
injury as the collapse of frameworks of the meaning of how people understand the society around them,
in this paper, I propose the need to understand rituals within a community's daily life as a catalyst to shift
an individual's healing from a crisis response model to sustained healing and wellness, addressing both
experiences of mental health and moral injury.

Individuals experiencing moral injury often describe feeling akin to bearing the moral guilt of the fall of
society. The communal stress experienced by the nation manifests itself as physical responses within
individuals' bodies. Like mental illness, experiences of moral injury provoke physical, emotional, and
spiritual responses. Polarized and fractured, are the people of the United States wrestling with their
morality when blatantly faced with their mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic? In 2020, nearly one in
five United States adults lived with mental illness (NIH). These rates were already climbing across
generations before 2020; in the ten years leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic, feelings of sadness and
hopelessness increased by approximately 40% (CDC). In 2022, 73% of LGBTQ youth reported experiencing
symptoms of anxiety, and 58% of LGBTQ youth reported experiencing symptoms of depression (The
Trevor Project). Experiences of mental illness are rising across all demographics. Could this data correlate
with COVID-19-related experiences of moral injury?

Emerging from the United States military context, moral injury has become increasingly recognized and
widespread throughout various contexts. Similarly to mental illness, studies show that moral injury is an
invisible epidemic, affecting millions. Emergency room physician, Torree McGowan, reflected on her time

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in the medical field during the rise of the COVID-19 Delta variant in early 2021 (Svoboda Moral Injury Is an
Invisible Epidemic That Affects Millions], 2022, Scientific American). Dr. McGowan reflects on being
forced to "abandon her own standards and watch people suffer and die" during the influx of patients
entering the emergency room doors. The American Education Research Journal published a study in
February 2020 that reported more than half of kindergarten through 12th-grade education professionals
moderately or strongly agree that they have faced morally harmful situations involving others. Moral
injury and mental illness are inextricably linked, but is the increase in mental health experiences directly
correlated to increased experiences of moral injury within the United States? How can ritual become a
tool for healing and sustained wellness related to experiences of moral injury and mental illness?

Author, Rita Nakashima Brock's Soul Repair, suggests that ritual and healing have been in relationship
throughout history (Brock [Soul Repair], 2012, Beacon Press). Pre-modern forms of healing are based on
the assumptions that disease was caused by lack of power or by possession by evil power endures in
popular religious imagination (Waters [Addiction and Pastoral Care], 2019, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
Co.). Healing in its earliest recorded form was often ritual in nature; early Christianity institutionalized the
forms of ritual healing through the practices of adorcism and exorcism. Rituals as tools for healing are still
widely recognized across contexts outside Western Christianity, a thread of historical healing that has
endured. How can modern theologians draw on the collective wisdom of our ancestors to imbue rituals
into the modern-day healing of mental illness and moral injury?

Studies have shown that mental illness and moral injury require a clinical response to address the body's
physical reactions, but could rituals be the key to addressing the psychological reactions and finding
sustained healing? Data on experiences of mental illness only speak to a part of the more significant
phenomena. Experiences of mental illness and moral injury continue to rise as people in the United States
navigate a fractured society after the COVID-19 pandemic; could communal rituals provide individuals
with the healing and sustained wellness needed? Should research begin to isolate the origins of moral
injury experiences? If so, will those origins become the link between experiences of mental illness and
moral injury? With initial data, it is clear there is a correlation between experiences of mental illness and
moral injury, and yet how can research tap into the present-day circumstances in the United States to
gain deeper insight into communal rituals as a source of individual healing and sustained wellness?

Need to come back to COVID-19 and the thesis, questions, conclusions – your conclusions can be a
summary of your findings, a set of recommended practices, a set of questions for further study, etc.