Mental Health in the War on Terror by Aggarwal Neil K

Mental Health in the War on Terror by Aggarwal Neil K

Author:Aggarwal, Neil K.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PSY036000, Psychology/Mental Health, POL037000, Political Science/Political Freedom & Security/Terrorism
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2015-01-12T16:00:00+00:00


Depictions of Suicide Bombers in the Mental Health Scholarship

THE TRIAL OF THE FIVE suspects charged with the 9/11 attacks—Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Walid bin Attash, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, and Mustafa Ahmad al-Hawsawi—began in June 2008. The suspects challenged their legal proceedings from the outset. At arraignment, Mohammed boasted, “I’m looking to be [a] martyr for [a] long time” and demanded the death penalty for the entire group (Glaberson 2008a). Some analysts wondered whether his acceptance of the death penalty would free the Bush administration from a lengthy trial, but others worried that a perceived act of martyrdom could strengthen al-Qaeda (Bender and Stockman 2008). Mohammed even threatened to rescind his plea if he was not sentenced to death (Staunton 2008).

His proclamations shocked the court. U.S. Army judge Stephen Henley questioned the competence of all five men to stand trial (El Akkad 2008). Attorneys for bin al-Shibh and al-Hawsawi suspected that Mohammed pressured their clients to seek the death penalty, so they sought additional mental health evaluations to assess their clients’ competencies to stand trial (Finn 2008a). Attorneys for bin al-Shibh also wanted an independent mental health evaluation to assess the presence of a mental disease or defect that precluded cooperation with his defense team, because he took a medication usually prescribed for schizophrenia, though the judge sided with the prosecution in presuming his competency (Finn 2008b). In November 2008, the five men entered joint confessions to avoid trial and receive the death penalty, again resurrecting questions about their mental competencies to stand trial (Glaberson 2008b).

This episode exposes the potential perils of evaluating normal and abnormal behaviors across cultures. In seeking the death penalty, the 9/11 suspects have rejected American medical and legal assumptions that self-death equates with suicide. In the seventeenth century, Puritan New Englanders outlawed suicide as a sin against God, a moral offense that has persisted since psychiatrists began treating suicide in the nineteenth century (Kushner 1991). Psychiatric textbooks still teach suicide as an action connected with sadness. For example, The American Psychiatric Publishing Textbook of Clinical Psychiatry opens its chapter on suicide with this disclaimer: “Every patient suicide is also a tragedy for the clinician and for the suicide survivors” (Simon 2008, 1637). Similarly, Kaplan and Sadock’s Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry explains that current research explores the link between depression and suicide: “Contemporary biological theories about suicide are inextricably linked to studies of depression, because this is the mental condition most often underlying suicide” (Sudak 2005, 2446). The historical links between American Protestantism and psychiatry have produced a culturally distinct form of knowledge that treats the desire for self-death as suicide. By this logic, the 9/11 suspects seeking the death penalty must be suicidal and need mental health evaluations. However, the 9/11 suspects view the death penalty not as a suicidal expression connected to sadness, but as an act of political defiance.

The situation elicits even more confusion if we turn to experts on martyrdom and suicide bombing to interpret the 9/11 suspects. For example, terrorism expert Harvey W.



Download



Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.