There and back again: The study of mental disorder and terrorist involvement.

Abstract

For the past forty years, researchers studied the relationship between mental disorder and terrorist involvement. The literature developed in four paradigms, each of which differs in terms of their empirical evidence, the specific mental disorders studied, and their conceptualizations of terrorist involvement. These paradigms have not, however, witnessed linear and incremental improvements upon one another. Although one paradigm has generally tended to dominate a temporal period, many false assumptions and incorrect interpretations of earlier work permeate into today's discourse. This paper provides a history of the study of mental disorders and the terrorist. First, we briefly outline the core fundamental principles of the first two paradigms, The paper then outlines the core arguments produced by the seminal reviews conducted in paradigm three. We highlight how these findings were consistently misinterpreted in subsequent citations. We then highlight recent innovations in the study of terrorism and mental disorder since the various influential literature reviews of 1997-2005. We conclude by outlining how future research in this area may improve in the coming years by broadening our understanding of both terrorist involvement and psychopathology away from simple dichotomous thinking.

Lone Actor Terrorist Attack Planning and Preparation: A Data‐Driven Analysis,

“…Constraints included target accessibility and degree of protection, but in some cases also encompassed distinctly personal factors, such as the likeliness that friends or family would be caught up in the attack. Research has indicated that the incidence of mental health problems is considerably higher among lone actor extremists than the general public and particularly pronounced when compared to group-based terrorists (16,94,95). Our findings support existing research which cautions that such findings should not be seen as providing a causal explanation for involvement in terrorism, as they suggest that such pathologies do not rule out the ability to engage in at least basic planning and cost-benefit analysis (1,18).…”

The Personality of Extremists: Examining Violent and Non-Violent Defense of Muslims

“…Honesty-humility is the second dimension that is instead linked to psychopathy (e.g., Lee & Ashton, 2014). Psychopathy used to be a popular explanation for extremist violence, although never corroborated in empirical research with validated measures (Gill & Corner, 2017). Here, we examined whether a well-validated measure that encompasses non-clinical psychopathic tendencies is associated with inclinations toward Jihadism.…”

“…Further, even if most extremists are not clinically ill (see Gill & Corner, & 2017), there are two HEXACO dimensions that have connections with psychopathology, at utmost trait levels (e.g., Ruchensky & Donnellan, 2017). Thus, we explored whether individuals with extremist inclinations might be described as having tendencies in a pathological direction, but at "pre-diagnostic" levels.…”

Simply insane? Attributing terrorism to mental illness (versus ideology) affects mental representations of race Word

“…The present research contributes to an emerging area of research that focuses on perceptions of race and culpability in the context of terrorism. It has repeatedly been documented that Western mainstream media tends to readily attribute the motives of potential terrorists to ideology when the alleged perpetrator is non-white and/or foreign but attributes it to mental illness when the perpetrator is a member of the White majority group (Gill & Corner, 2017). Arguably, this bias reflects people's desire to protect the worth of their ingroup and to hold out-group members morally accountable (Chen et al, 2015;Clark et al, 2014;Mercier et al, 2018;Noor et al, 2018).…”