Typology development entails systematically clustering related attributes among individuals or groups to examine trends that might explain complex human interactions and behaviours. This approach has demonstrated its usefulness in behavioural sciences with important implications for policy, etiology, course, and treatment. Our review article provides an overview of terrorism typologies and examines their implications for clinical practice. We argue that the theoretical nature and heterogeneity of existing terrorism typologies limit their clinical usefulness, highlighting the need to develop empirically driven typologies.
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Ethical Issues in the Assessment of Terror Subjects
The psychiatric evaluation of people who have committed acts of terrorism requires a unique sensitivity to cultural and political context. This is because terrorism has multiple definitions and can be used to silence political and ethnic minorities. There- fore, professional appraisals of risk and threat may require an ethics approach that intertwines individual and community factors, considering history and culture along- side individual risks. Narrative ethics using root cause and liberation theories may be one method to assess both contextual and personal contributions to terrorist behaviour, and provide a robust account of the cultural and contextual realities of terrorism.
Read moreThe Psychiatric Aspects of Terrorism: Prevention and Rehabilitation
Preventing terrorism has thus far been in the domain of national security and law enforcement agencies. The expectation that psychiatry has a primary role to play in the rehabilitation of those involved in terrorism remains controversial, although the significance of certain mental disorders has been highlighted among lone-actor terrorists. This paper provides an overview of the motivating factors for radicalization to terrorism at both community and individual levels, as well as preventive and rehabilitative approaches to terrorism. We argue that psychiatry may have a role to play in these approaches with the goal of preventing violence in select cases.
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