Biography
Dr. Litz is a clinical psychologist and Professor in the Departments of Psychiatry and Psychological and Brain Sciences and is also the Director of the Mental Health Core of the Massachusetts Veterans Epidemiological Research and Information Center at the VA Boston Healthcare System. Dr. Litz is internationally recognized as an expert on PTSD, military trauma, and the early intervention and treatment of trauma, traumatic loss, and moral injury.
Dr. Litz recent work entails a new social-functional theory of moral injury (Litz, B. T., & Walker, H. E. (2025). Moral Injury: An Overview of Conceptual, Definitional, Assessment, and Treatment Issues. Annual review of clinical psychology, 21(1), 251–277), the development and validation of a new measure of moral injury as a multidimensional outcome (the Moral Injury Outcome Scale; a public domain scale available by emailing Dr. Litz), conducing a VA funded population study of the prevalence and functional impact of moral injury in US Veterans (Litz, B. T., Walker, H. E., Pietrzak, R. H., & Rusowicz-Orazem, L. (2025). The prevalence of moral distress and moral injury among U.S. veterans. Journal of psychiatric research, 189, 435–444), conducting a program evaluation of a rehabilitation program for incarcerated Veterans in the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, and research on measurement-based care and point of care studies in PTSD (Litz, B. T. (2023). It is time to flip the script and leverage the point of care to discover ways of improving treatment outcomes for posttraumatic stress disorder: commentary on “A sobering look at treatment effectiveness of military-related posttraumatic stress disorder”(Levi et al., 2021). Clinical Psychological Science, 11(2), 381-387). Dr. Litz has over 400 peer reviewed publications. He is a fellow of the Association of Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies, the American Psychopathological Association, and the Association for Psychological Science.