Interview with a Psychiatrist on Terrorism
Stuart Twemlow: The ‘terrorist’ is no fire-breathing dragon
http://www.himalmag.com/The-terrorist-is-no-fire-breathing-dragon_nw2424.html
Excerpts:
I see the ‘terrorist’ as an offspring of the prevalent social system. Fear,
horror and shock which transfixes are characteristics of terror. I saw a
woman four years after she had escaped from her husband who used to keep her
chained to a chair, and she was still terrified that he would kill her. That
is domestic terrorism, and the prevalence is 18,000 out of 100,000 families
in the US alone. In the middle category are school shooters, classified by
the FBI as ‘anarchic terrorists’. On a bigger scale, terrorists consider
themselves to be victims of humiliation by the enemy with incompatible
political, religious or personal ideologies. The more terrifying the act,
the more transfixing it becomes.
Terrorism involves a devaluation of all human relationships. However, I
never use the term ‘terrorist’ in negotiations, and nor do I use labels like
bi-polar or schizophrenic for my patients. The use of a label is
stigmatising, and more humanity is brought in by doing away with
categorisation. Sometimes the ‘terrorist’ is viewed as a mentally ill
person; however, there is no evidence to support this diagnosis. Jerald
Post, a psychiatrist with affiliations to the CIA, who has probably examined
more ‘terrorists’ than any other person, did not find any sign of mental
illness. To prevent terrorism, one has to understand that the terrorist is
trying to say something, which he believes in. A terrorist is a social
activist gone wrong.
Terrorism involves power dynamics of the victim-victimiser-bystander paradigm. The approach I recommend, and have used successfully in anti-bullying programmes in
schools, is to transform the bystander into a community leader.
At a political level, statements about ‘crushing terrorism’ are
counter-productive, and make no more sense than saying that bad temper can
be eliminated. In fact, declarations of war inflate the grandiosity of the
enemy by creating an oversimplified mindset towards the enemy, leading to
notions like ‘attaining favours in heaven’, as in the case of suicide
bombers. Statements heaping contempt on ‘terrorists’ further fuel the
enemy’s outrage. The only pragmatic way to proceed is one of negotiation,
with the idea ‘that there is no enemy’ and of treating ‘terrorists’ as human
beings with a cause.