About 40% of lone-wolf terrorists are driven by mental illness, not ideology
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Researchers have long studied the relationship between mental illness and terrorism, particularly lone-wolf terrorists. These cases include persons such as the radical Muslim man who killed a soldier outside Canada’s Parliament; the right-wing extremist who opened fire on government buildings in Texas and tried to burn down the Mexican Consulate; the al-Qaeda-inspired-assailant who killed an off-duty soldier in London; or the Iranian Shi’a who, in the name of Sunni fundamentalism, killed two in a Sydney coffee shop last week.
Law enforcement claimed all of them were terrorists who were motivated by ideology, but many researchers, psychologists, and family members say they were mentally ill.
A study funded by the U.S. Justice Department and conducted by Ramon Spaaij, a sociologist at Australia’s Victoria University, and Mark Hamm of Indiana State University, says that there is a significant link between mental problems and the making of a lone-wolf terrorist, leading to cautious hope that future attacks may be avoided.
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“It’s never an either-or in terms of ideology versus mental illness,” Spaaij said. “It’s a dangerous cocktail.” This, according to a report on HomeLand Security News Wire.
Lone-wolf attacks do not require sophisticated planning, making them difficult to intercept by using popular counterterrorism strategies, including communications surveillance. “There’s no great complexity to it,” said London Police chief Bernard Hogan-Howe. “So what that means is that we have a very short time to interdict, to actually intervene and make sure that these people don’t get away with it.”
In Spaaij’s study of ninety-eight lone wolf attackers in the United States, 40% had identifiable mental health problems, compared with 1.5 percent of the general population. The study concluded that mental illness is not the only factor that leads an individual to commit terrorist acts, but it is one of the factors. Mental illness can contribute to “shaping particular belief systems and in constructing the enemy, externalizing blame for one’s own failure or grievances onto this all-threatening enemy,” Spaaj said.
