Word.ws English Dictionary

moral distress

moral distress noun: a form of emotional or psychological distress that occurs when a person knows the ethically appropriate action to take but is prevented from acting due to external constraints, such as policy restrictions or an insufficiently powerful role.

Noun

moral distress (uncountable)

  1. A form of emotional or psychological distress that occurs when a person knows the ethically appropriate action to take but is prevented from acting due to external constraints, such as policy restrictions or an insufficiently powerful role.
    • Moral distress arises when one knows the right thing to do, but institutional constraints make it nearly impossible to pursue the right course of action.1984, Andrew Jameton, Nursing Practice: The Ethical Issues, Prentice-Hall, page 6
    • Unlike burnout, moral distress isn’t primarily exhaustion. Unlike trauma, it isn’t primarily fear. Instead, moral distress arises from an unspoken, collective agreement to pretend things are fine when they’re clearly not. It’s the quiet erosion of professional identity—the gradual realization that...2025 May 3, Dr. Jenny Shields, “DSM-5 doesn’t name it, but moral distress is everywhere in medicine”, in KevinMD

Origin of moral distress

The term was first used in clinical nursing literature in the 1980s and first formally described by Andrew Jameton in 1984.

Questions about moral distress

What does moral distress mean?
Moral distress means a form of emotional or psychological distress that occurs when a person knows the ethically appropriate action to take but is prevented from acting due to external constraints, such as policy restrictions or an insufficiently powerful role.
What part of speech is moral distress?
Moral distress is a noun.

Words near moral distress in the dictionary

  1. moral circles
  2. moral code
  3. moral codes
  4. moral compass
  5. moral compasses
  6. moral distress
  7. moral diversities
  8. moral diversity
  9. moral duties
  10. moral duty
  11. moral event horizon

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: moral distress (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “moral distress.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/moral_distress. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.