Mental Health in the War on Terror
Culture, Science, and Statecraft
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- 54,99 €
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- 54,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
Neil Krishan 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. 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, 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 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. Throughout, Aggarwal explores this fascinating, troublesome transformation of mental-health science into a potential instrument of counterterrorism.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
From shell shock to PTSD, mental health medicine has long concerned itself with the shocks of war. In this debut, psychiatrist Aggarwal examines how the practice of mental health has been deployed as a political weapon, and how the discipline has struggled to understand the unique cultural problems of the "war on terror." The questions he asks include whether clinicians should work in military facilities that torture, and if a detainee's symptoms in response to torture might preclude him from his own defense. Aggarwal thoroughly interrogates the available scholarship, charging the mental health profession with creating an account of suicide bombing and other terrorist acts that doesn't sufficiently consider cultural and historical factors. This book may not be particularly accessible for the lay reader, but the questions it poses are valuable, difficult, and without easy answers for clinicians, military leaders, or even civilians, all of whom must live with a medical culture deeply marked by the war on terror.
