Ideological Terrorism As a Mental Health Issue

This is probably the strangest bit of random philosophizing I've ever done. But I had this idea about terrorism and I thought I'd write it down.

In the US and in many countries around the world, there are laws that allow people to be committed involuntarily as the result of mental illness. In the United States, there are many kinds of safeguards against false or unnecessary imprisonment, which can be summed up as the following basic principles:

• The person must be found to be mentally incapable by a psychiatrist or panel of psychiatrists.
• Because of their mental status, the person must be a danger to himself or herself, or to other people.
• The danger to self or others must be such that only institutionalization can prevent harm.
• While in the institution, the individual must receive treatment for their disorder.
• While in the institution, the individual's status must be reviewed frequently (e.g., every six months).

I believe that terrorism--the deliberate slaughtering of innocents--is the product of the worst kind of conduct disorder and delusional mental status. There is currently no "official" diagnosis in the APA manual for "Ideological Terrorism Disorder" (ITD), but I think that one could be well-motivated and clearly defined. Even in the absence of a separate diagnosis, there are components of existing disorders that can be identified with terrorism: delusions of various sorts, paranoia, depression, conduct disorder, and obsessive-compulsion. But the core disorder, it seems to me, is that the individual terrorist has been infected, so to speak, with an ideology that cancels out normal standards of social awareness, and that promotes terrorism, even self-destructive terrorism, by the individual. There have been many such ideologies; this is by no means an attack on the currently most frequent one in cases of terrorism, so-called Islamism.

The question has often been asked, why so few Islamist terrorists? If the ideology intrinsically promotes violence, why is it that only a few individuals actually commit terrorist acts? I believe that this state of affairs is strong evidence for the terrorism-as-mental-illness hypothesis that I am promoting here. That is, as the ideology itself becomes prevalent throughout the community, ITD is triggered only in susceptible individuals, not universally.

If this hypothesis is accepted--and I'll return to an important reason why it will be difficult for this to happen--then it follows that ITD individuals are not responsible for their actions, any more than other mentally deranged individuals are for theirs. Therefore, the issues of guilt and punishment do not apply to them. Instead, the important question is whether those individuals present a danger to themselves or to others that cannot be controlled without institutionalization. If an individual presents with ITD, they are almost by definition a danger without institutionalization, and so in most cases, an ITD diagnosis would lead directly to long-term institutionalization, until periodic review indicates that the person no longer has ITD.

I believe that this approach is highly satisfactory compared to the military or criminal approaches that we now apply, for two reasons. I think that this approach will be more effective at preventing harm to the individual or to society, and I think that it offers the possibility of treatment and possibly a return to normal or near-normal life for the ITD individual, through out-patient monitoring or eventual remission and release.

Why isn't this approach already in place? In the face of the horrible acts perpetuated by ITD individuals, why hasn't the mental health community and the government responded in the manner outline above?

There is an existing problem with the diagnosis of delusional disorders: many delusions are so widespread that they cannot be considered abnormal. I may offend many here, but the prime example of this is religious delusions. There are many psychiatric patients whose delusional systems involve religious aspects. Millions of "normal" people accept as true the reports that Jesus, Moses, Muhammed, or Joseph Smith conversed with God or with angels, and that God, angels, or other supernatural entities affect their daily life. Society can accept this kind of delusion as long as it is benign, that is, that it doesn't cause antisocial acts. This fact interferes with the diagnosis of some individuals, such as many schizophrenics, whose delusions tend to run along conventional religious tracks. For example, we accept that people somehow hear God telling them what to do, as long as their actions are not harmful to themselves or others, or are not outside the conventions of normal behavior.

This can also be true of non-religious ideologies. People can become "true believers" in such things as racial or national superiority, or that certain social systems are inherently bad or even evil, as long as they do not harm others or themselves, or become too eccentric in their personal behavior.

This makes the task of diagnosing standard disorders such as schizophrenia more difficult, not to mention a disorder like ITD where the defining symptom, outside an ideology that is shared by millions of "normal" individuals, is the commission, planning, or substantive support of acts of terror. Yet, there seems little doubt that in susceptible individuals, certain ideologies have been demonstrated to trigger antisocial acts, including terrorism.

I do not think that simply because ITD individuals may share the same ideology as people who do not commit antisocial or terrorist acts, that we should fail to recognize the fact of the disorder; that the disorder, with proper study, may have brain correlates and may eventually be treatable. If we are to combat terrorism, and if terrorism is the product of a mental disorder, as I believe the facts indicate, then the failure to involve the mental health community, and the system of laws, procedures, and safeguards that exist for them to use, is like fighting with one arm behind our back.

The US government has imprisoned hundreds of individuals, and our leadership has basically spun a web of legalalistic rationalizations to support their continued imprisonment, in ways that go against our legal tradition and our constitution. However, if ITD were recognized, along with peer-reviewed, tested standards of diagnosis and treatment, it is my contention that the individuals we have imprisoned could have been treated much more justly using the mechanisms of our mental health system mentioned above. Their rights would have been protected, but also their safety and the safety of society, in an open and compassionate way.

One final thought. What about people like Osama bin-Laden? He personally, as far as I know, has committed no terrorist act; certainly no act of suicidal terrorism. Where does he fit into this picture?

I think that bin-Laden is a sociopath. He understands very well the processes of ITD, and he works to trigger it in as many susceptible individuals as he can, and he assists them in manifesting their disorder by carrying out ideologically motivated terrorist acts. This kind of malevolent parasitism has been seen from time to time in the past, where a sociopath has manipulated mentally ill individuals to carry out acts of violence, but because of the very nature of ITD, it is possible for al-Qaeda to work on a much wider scale, and for a much more focused purpose, than in the historical examples of the deliberate manipulation of schizophrenics.

In summary, I suggest that there is a mental disorder that I have labeled Ideological Terrorism Disorder, ITD, that is at the root of the vast wave of terrorism we are currently witnessing; that ITD individuals should be handled via the mental health system rather than solely by the military and criminal justice systems; that this approach would be more effective in protecting society as well in protecting the ITD individuals themselves.

On credibility

We've been hearing a great deal about credibility lately. There are currently almost 1.5 million hits on Google for +bush-administration +credibility +2007. Virtually all the articles say the same thing, that the administration's credibility is either eroding or is already at floor; there are differences about the topic, though. Left wingers focus mostly on the war and torture (along with quite a few other matters), while right-wingers mostly focus on immigration. But they all agree that the Bush administration has a credibility problem.

We also hear about the credibility of Congress. A lot of people voted for Democrats so they would end the war. However, the war is still going strong, facilitated by legislation passed by a Democratically led Congress.

What interests me, however, is that there are actually two different issues that tend to get lumped under the credibility rubric: truthfulness and delivery of what was promised.

Under the law, intentions are everything. If you promise something in good faith but cannot deliver because of circumstances that you cannot control and that you couldn't reasonably have been expected to know about, then you are considered blameless. A somewhat similar situation obtains in politics.

If a political leader promises something and doesn't fulfil the promise, there are a couple of possible consequences.

• Everyone knows that it was just campaign rhetoric ("no child left behind"), no one expected it to be fulfilled literally. In this case, no credibility is lost unless the politician's behavior goes flatly against the entire flow of the campaign. Even then this is a gray area, and it depends in large part on the economy.
• The individual leader makes a strong attempt to fulfill the promise, but is blocked by other politicians or other factors. This is more serious. No one doubts that the individual told the truth when he made the promise initially, but he still loses credibility in terms of effectiveness.

This highlights the dichotomy. In order to be credible as a politician, you must be perceived as (1) honest, and (2) effective.

The Bush administration had developed a reputation in left-wing circles as dishonest, and as a result had little credibility. However, for the population at large, it wasn't until Hurricane Katrina, when the administration was exposed as grossly ineffective, that the most serious credibility problems began.

It is also true that there is a kind of osmosis here. If you doubt someone's effectiveness, then it becomes easier to doubt their honesty, and vice-versa. Furthermore, when some people with a given label lose credibility, for either reason or both, then it becomes easier to see other people with the same label as having low credible. This can result in a downward credibility spiral such as we have seen with the Bush administration and Republicans, within the US, and Americans in general, outside the US.

In the domain of politics, it is extremely difficult -- usually impossible -- to rebuild lost credibility. This means that the response we have seen by the Bush administration of ignoring the credibility issue may actually be rational. That is, the credibility game is irreparably lost, so the only thing that matters is (1) helping their contributers, and (2) trying to clean up the future historical record by both actions and secrecy.

In first few years of the Bush administration -- George Lakoff has pointed this out also -- Bush's credibility was actually protected by this "good ol' boy" pseudo redneck shuffle. That is, if Bush didn't carry through on a promise or made some other error, it was put down to ineffectiveness rather than dishonesty. Even in leftwing circles, where his honesty had been questioned for some time, there was debate about whether such and such a piece of wrongdoing was the result of dishonesty or of foolishness. This is in large part why it took Katrina to make most people realize not only that the administration was ineffective, but, by osmosis, that it was also dishonest. In a way, it was only after Katrina that many people finally understood that the Bush administration never had any significant supporting evidence for the contention that Saddam Hussein either had weapons of mass destruction, or that he had any desire or intention of using whatever weapons he did have against the United States.

Well, it's definitely been a strange almost-seven years since the 2000 elections, and the issue of credibility has been a large part of the strangeess.

Abolish Veterans Affairs Healthcare?

In the United States, we have government-operated, single-payer healthcare for only a few selected segments of our population: the very poor, through Medicare; prisoners; the military; and veterans, through the VA healthcare system. The rest of the country must pay their own way, through a mosaic of private deals between employers and individuals on the one hand, and insurance companies of various kinds, but almost always "for profit", on the other. This system has always seemed to ridiculous, in that the argument against "socialized medicine" has been that it would taint our democracy and lead to communism; yet, we provide socialized medicine to millions of members of special groups throughout the land.

Up until now, I have been against this because it seemed unfair to the population at large that they could not share the benefits given to prisoners and military veterans. But today, I read about the study by CBS investigators concerning the suicide rate among veterans, especially young veterans of the "War on Terror". It seems that the rate is about four times higher for those individuals than it is for their age-mates in the general population, as many as 120 suicides per week among those veterans. This is obviously a failure of the VA healthcare system, yet, it is difficult to criticize them unduly. The VA must provide healthcare to veterans both during peacetime and during and after combat episodes. This means that there will be long periods of relatively low and stable utilization punctuated by surges of high utilization. Its is very difficult for the VA to respond adequately during these surge periods because their resources tend to be optimized to the long periods of inter-war stability.

But what if there was no separate VA healthcare system? What if all Americans could receive the healthcare they needed from government-operated facilities? Over time, the resources of the system would become optimized to cover the needs of all Americans, a much larger and more widely distributed group. This would benefit all Americans in obvious ways: no one would be without healthcare; costs would go down; there would be an increased focus on preventative care and so overall health would improve. The undoubted benefit to the general population of socialized medicine is something I've believed in for a long time. It clearly would also benefit veterans, because one of the complaints that veterans tend to have about the VA is that for many of them, it's a long trek to the regional VAMC where they can be treated. Under universal socialized medicine, there would be few if any VA-specific medical facilities, and veterans would largely be treated closer to where they lived, which would benefit them greatly. However, the CBS study suggests another benefit to veterans that would follow the abandonment of VA healthcare in favor of universal socialized medicine: it would help mitigate the wartime surges of healthcare demand -- for the kind of mental health treatment that could reduce the suicide rate among veterans, but also for other kinds of healthcare. All those veterans who must wait a year or more for treatment by the VA would be much more likely to get prompt attention if they could go to any facility in the nation.

So, rather than blame the VA for the suicide epidemic among young veterans, to me they are just another casualty of the greed-based American healthcare system in general. Maybe someday we will be able to move past our individualistic cowboy mentality and understand that there are certain things that simply work better when we operate collectively as a nation "united".

Some thoughts on Internet-based language learning

Sometime ago, I decided I wanted to use the multinational aspect of the Internet to help me improve my French. Here are some comments on the experience so far. My situation is, located in California, with no local contact with the French language except through books and other written material. We get TV5, the French cable channel, but we don't watch that as much as we should, and it's not interactive, so if you don't understand something, it's just gone.

The first thing I did, several years ago, was to start a bilingual discussion mailing list, called Freng. It started with free discussion, but it was clear that some kind of structure would improve things, or so I thought, so I came up with the idea of serializing public domain texts, found for example at the Gutenberg Project. For the past several years, we have been doing this, reading English and French texts on alternate days. We are currently well along in Monsieur LeCoq by Émile Gaboriau, and also The Breaking Point by Mary Roberts Rinehart. What happens is that we receive each day a selection, about a screenful, in email. The truth is, discussion is very sporadic, and only a few of the members usually discuss anything. However, it's really great to read a serialized novel in this way. My intention is to change the Freng list over to a web-based discussion group, with the same daily distribution of serialized texts; however, this probably isn't going to happen for at least a few months.

But since I started Freng, blogs have become much more important, and in particular, Corine Lesnes' Big Picture blog, which is a French-based blog (Corine is a journalist with Le Monde), but which includes people of various language backgrounds and has a true international flair. It is really on Big Pic that the kind of discussion I had originally envisioned is truly available. I'm sure there are other venues for this, there are thousands of blogs out there.

Those are the main things I currently do on the Internet to improve my French.

However, there is one more thing I want to mention in this regard. Since my object is to learn, it is not sufficient for me that I merely make myself understood. I also want to get feedback specifically on things like vocabulary, grammar, othography, and so on. To do this, I invested in a tool that has proven quite useful, although it has quite a few limitations.

The tool is a pair of programs called Ultralingua and Grammatica, both available here. Ultralingua has a variety of modules; the relevant one is English-French. You put your cursor on a word you don't know and type (on the Mac) F1, and a little window pops up with the definition. You can also enter words directly into a bilingual dictionary panel to get definitions. It also has a verb conjugator. Grammatica has several modules as well; the relevant one is, of course, French. This is a grammar checker. You highlight a sentence or a paragraph or a phrase, and type F2. Grammatica goes through it and complains about various kinds of grammar problems, usually offering one or more suggestions. This is great for reminding you about gender agreement, verb concord, accent mark placement, and so on.

There are two more tools I use. I have a Systran dashboard widget (this is on the Mac, I'm sure there are Windows equivalents) that does computer translations to and from a bunch of languages. If I'm not sure I've gotten the meaning quite right on a French sentence, I'll get Systran to translate it and see. This helps with false cognates and some of the details of verb tenses and so on. Sometimes I'll use Systran to translate English to French, but surprisingly, I really don't use that aspect of it very much. In any case, the translations are often pretty awkward. It is what it is.

The other tool is Google. Ultralingua has a panel that allows you to enter a phrase and a context, and it calls Google to find examples. It is useful, and I use it sometimes, but I usually just type in the phrase in Google. If, for example, I'm not sure that people say "penser de", I'll just google for tha sequence.

The result of this approach is generally pretty good. It's not like it corrects all my mistakes, I still make plenty, but it catches a lot of them. I think that over time, I don't make as many. My vocabulary is slowly improving. Grammatica doesn't help much with certain things, like verbal prepositions, and both Grammatica & Ultralingua have a limited wordlist. When Grammatica encounters a word it doesn't know, you can tell it to ignore it, but then the quality of the grammar check goes downhill. A better idea would be to allow you to enter a word that patterns grammatically about the same as the unknown word. Even if the match wasn't perfect, I think that would improve the grammar check. I think this means that sometimes what I write may be technically correct but not idiomatic French. Hopefully, as I read more French, this problem will correct itself.

The other problem is that my writing is probably too academic, not as natural as I might want it to be. Sort of "bookish". But, given the approach I've chosen and the methods I'm using, I guess there's not much I can do about that. Obviously, my verbal ability isn't going to improve much with this method, but the truth is, what would I use the ability to speak French for? Who would I speak to?

Well, if anyone reads this and wants to comment or write down things they've tried vis-à-vis using the Internet to help with language learning, vas-y.

The US invasion is a knife in Iraq's chest

I think that this is a pretty good metaphor for the invasion and occupation of Iraq. If you get stabbed deeply, sometimes the presence of the knife blade can push cut or broken tissues together and slow down the bleeding; that, along with the certainty of even greater damage as the blade is withdrawn, can be an argument for leaving the knife in place, at least for a while. In the metaphor, the knife is generally left in place until the victim (1) is in the O.R. and is medically stabilized enough for the withdrawal, or (2) dies.

Therefore, as much as it pains me to say it, there could be an argument for American troops (the blade of the knife) to stay in the heart of Iraq. I think there is even an effective way to do it that I'll mention below. However, returning to the metaphor, the issue of how to extract the knife and help the victim to recover is a separate one from the criminal matter, which is that when you stab someone deeply in the chest, you must generally face criminal charges. In the present case, the facts of the invasion would probably lead to manslaughter charges rather than to murder charges, because the goal was not to destroy Iraq (even though that is pretty close to the consequences of the invasion). However, manslaughter is a serious crime, and the perpetuators--the US and its allies--must face the consequences in terms of international war crimes procedures. I personally feel that along with the individuals in the American government who were directly responsible, the American electorate also shares a significant role. I have no idea what kind of punishment would fit the crime, but at the very minimum, I think that a formal admission of wrongdoing and the sincerest apology would be a good start. As for the ringleaders, they should be thrown from public office and spend the rest of their miserable lives in jail.

As for how American forces can stay effectively in Iraq, I go back to a letter I wrote to the New York Times in 2004: more than ever, we need a voter referendum in Iraq. There really is no other way for us to be seen as a legitimate presence there. The government, created by us, cannot legitimize us. Only the people can, in a direct referendum. We should contribute whatever resources are required for a national referendum, but the voting should be monitored by international observers. The question must be: "Should American forces stay in Iraq for one more year?" Part of the basis of the referendum would be that after a year, another referendum would be held with the same question.

If a majority of Iraqis ask us to stay, then, as the perpetuators of the deadly knife blow, we owe them that much. However, our status would be changed for the better: it's one thing to occupy a country by force; it's quite another thing to do so by the specific request of the people. One the other hand, if a majority do not want us to stay, then we of course still would have an obligation to do whatever it takes to help the victim of our attack (i.e., financially, technical advising, etc.), but we must withdraw our blade from her heart as quickly and smoothly as possible.