A cliché leads us to define, not always but often, subjects who commit particularly violent and extreme crimes as “insane”.
In the global climate of terror that has been created since the famous 11 September, the theme widens, raising doubts about the mental health of terrorists .
At least sometimes we have had the doubt: “Are the perpetrators of terrorist massacres crazy?”. Trying to do a research it is observed that in the literature there is not much scientific evidence that mental disorder is at the basis of terrorist violence.
It seems strange but at the moment we do not even find concordant definitions on what we define terrorism or terrorist: the mafiosi who in carrying out attacks – to terrorize the state and bring it to negotiations – killed innocent victims, were they terrorists? Those who knew that their toxic factories were killing workers and inhabitants and, despite the alarming and irrefutable data, were trying to pacify public opinion from the climate of terror that was spreading, were they anti-terrorists?
Common sense comes to our aid and in the end we find agreement in everyday language; in principle we have a shared idea of a terrorist, we know what we are referring to.
Those who try to study the phenomenon, from a psychopathological point of view, immediately realize that they will be faced with a spectrum of terrorist mentalities united by the use of violence, even against civilians, with the voluntary intent to achieve ideological, political or psychological objectives. .
There are those who identify a difference between separatist / independence terrorism (see Ireland, Spain or South Tyrol in Italy in the 1960s) and terrorism linked to religious extremisms (such as that present in the Middle East area).
We will focus on the latter in which there is a differentiating element: the presence of the attacker’s suicidal conduct. Such suicides must be placed in a cultural – not psychopathological – context in which martyrdom is placed in the foreground.
Death will give a reward in an afterlife. This mental set-up is already present when entering the terrorist group, the indoctrination operation has already been carried out. Those who opt for martyrdom have already had the opportunity to conceptualize it before, participation in the holy war is a consequence of a reflection that is upstream.
Once membership in the group is official, strategic tactical training is provided, there is no need for anything else. Suicide is part of an act of martyrdom, the renunciation of life for a greater good. We could consider this at best a cultural illness, not a mental illness .
Wanting to use elements of psychology, we can hypothesize in these subjects some inelastic mental structures, unable to assume different points of view, which operate mentally by selecting what confirms their thesis and discarding what puts them in crisis, with the tendency to jump immediately to conclusions and with an inability to put oneself in the other’s shoes.
But all of these are characteristics that we can find in many non-terrorist personality structures. They are not specific elements of a terrorist’s mentality. From a medical point of view they are certainly organisms with high basic energy levels – I guess it takes a lot of basic energy to be a terrorist – but in a way not unlike that found in many entrepreneurs.
All the elements really seem to highlight the cultural rather than psychopathological order. If this is plausible for subjects coming directly from the countries in which those cultural realities have been structured for centuries, how would Western subjects be understood, born and raised in totally different cultural contexts, who detach themselves from their own social and cultural structure to enter part of terrorist groups?
Those who have tried to study this phenomenon have realized that bringing up poverty or the type of religion is not enough to explain the phenomenon: in the West there are about 50 million converts to Islam who have no intention of joining the terrorist groups – even among those who have radical Islamic beliefs only a few would join a terrorist organization – not to mention the number of subjects who have long been aware of the state of poverty and do not contemplate their possible participation in any type of fight, be it holy or not.
Even for foreign fighters, the issue would seem more linked to psychological factors rather than to a full-blown mental illness.
Psychopathic subjects or victims of brainwashing would not join together but young people who have fallen into daily life, in a phase of social transition, often on the line of the social border, in a phase of identity crisis, certainly hostile to the Western system.
Personally I am of the opinion that these subjects are not in good health, probably they have a subthreshold pathology, but there are no elements to assert this with certainty. Many questions remain open: the reality is that they are personalities that cannot be evaluated
. The psychological profile is only hypothesized, constructed on the basis of “a posteriori” news or stories from neighbors and acquaintances and an assessment made in a prison environment I do not think has their collaboration to be evaluated from a psychological point of view.
In conclusion, it is still worth pausing to think, since understanding the mentality of these does not mean accepting or minimizing the seriousness of such conduct, but starting to build more articulated and effective preventive paths – it has been seen that control alone does not mean it is enough – at a time when we too find ourselves forced to deal with our own belief systems and value schemes.
