Mental Health in the War on Terror

Auteur

Neil Aggarwal is a psychiatrist at Columbia University and the New York State Psychiatric Institute. His areas of research interest are cultural psychiatry, cultural competence training, and psychiatric anthropology. He is especially interested in conceptions of health and illness among South Asian and Middle Eastern populations.

Texte du rabat

Neil Aggarwal's timely study finds that mental-health and biomedical professionals have created new forms of knowledge and practice in their desire to understand and fight terrorism, and in the process, psychiatrists and psychologists have either worked uncritically to protect state interests or labored to protect undesirable populations from state control. Professional interpretation, like all interpretations, is subject to cultural forces. Drawing on cultural psychiatry and medical anthropology, Aggarwal analyzes the transformation of definitions for normal and abnormal behavior in a vast array of sources: government documents, professional bioethical debates, legal motions and opinions, psychiatric and psychological scholarship, media publications, and policy briefs. Critical themes emerge on the use of mental health in awarding or denying disability to returning veterans, characterizing the confinement of Guantanamo detainees, contextualizing the actions of suicide bombers, portraying Muslim and Arab populations in psychiatric and psychological scholarship, illustrating bioethical issues in the treatment of detainess, and supplying the methods employed to deradicalize terrorists. Throughout, Aggarwal explores the fascinating, troublesome transformation of mental-health practice into a potential instrument of counterterrorism.

Résumé
An investigation into the unintended cultural and psychological consequences of our fight against terrorism.

Contenu

Preface1. Mental Health, Culture, and Power in the War on Terror2. Bioethics and the Conduct of Mental Health Professionals in the War on Terror3. The Meanings of Symptoms and Services for Guantanamo Detainees4. Depictions of Arabs and Muslims in Psychodynamic Scholarship5. Depictions of Suicide Bombers in the Mental Health Scholarship6. Knowledge and Practice in War on Terror Deradicalization ProgramsEpilogueNotesReferencesIndex