Book Review

Abstract

In Moral Distress and Injury in Human Services: Cases, Causes, and Strategies for Prevention, Frederic Reamer provides a much-needed introduction to the concepts of moral distress and moral injury. As an eminent educator, researcher, and ethicist in the field of social work, Reamer draws on his extensive experience to ground concepts in practice-based examples and case studies,which are particularly valuable resources for educators in socialwork training and continuing education programs. The concept ofmoral distresswas developed in nursing and ethics scholarship in the 1980s. As recently as 2009, scholars observed that, even though nurses and social workers practice in similarly complex, hierarchical, and morally fraught contexts, the concept has been conspicuously absent from North American social work scholarship. (See Merlinda Weinberg, “Moral Distress: A Missing but Relevant Concept for Ethics in Social Work,” Canadian Social Work Review 26, no. 2 [2009]: 139–51.) Research and teaching on ethics in social work often focus on explications and applications of ethical principles in relation to major ethical dilemmas and overt transgressions by providers.This orientation sometimes fails to attend to the psychological toll of “everyday” ethical challenges in practice,which are complicated bymeso andmacro contexts, such as organizational practices or social policies.Moral Distress and Injury in Human Services provides a helpful foundation for a deeper dive into ethics in social work practice and integration of the concepts of moral distress and injury in the field. Reamer defines moral distress as “the psychological disequilibrium and negative feeling state experiencedwhen a personmakes amoral decision but does not follow through by performing the behavior indicated by that decision” (13). He defines moral injury as “harm that results when someone has