Mental Health in the War on Terror: Culture, Science, and Statecraft
Neil Aggarwal
Abstract
This book finds that mental-health and biomedical professionals have created new forms of knowledge and practice in their desire to understand and fight terrorism. In the process, the state has used psychiatrists and psychologists to furnish knowledge on undesirable populations, and psychiatrists and psychologists have protected state interests. Professional interpretation, like all interpretations, is subject to cultural forces. Drawing on cultural psychiatry and medical anthropology, the book analyzes the transformation of definitions for normal and abnormal behavior in a vast array of sourc ... More
This book finds that mental-health and biomedical professionals have created new forms of knowledge and practice in their desire to understand and fight terrorism. In the process, the state has used psychiatrists and psychologists to furnish knowledge on undesirable populations, and psychiatrists and psychologists have protected state interests. Professional interpretation, like all interpretations, is subject to cultural forces. Drawing on cultural psychiatry and medical anthropology, the book 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 Guantánamo detainees, contextualizing the actions of suicide bombers, portraying Muslim and Arab populations in psychiatric and psychological scholarship, illustrating bioethical issues in the treatment of detainees, and supplying the knowledge and practice to deradicalize terrorists. The book explores this troublesome transformation of mental-health science into a potential instrument of counterterrorism.
Keywords:
mental-health professionals,
biomedical professionals,
terrorism,
professional interpretation,
cultural forces,
bioethical debates,
counterterrorism
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2015 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780231166645 |
| Published to Columbia Scholarship Online: November 2015 |
DOI:10.7312/columbia/9780231166645.001.0001 |
