On Monday, the 15th of September, the morning news contained three separate items that were of international, national, and domestic relevance respectively. Although each item was spoken of separately, they were, in reality, all interrelated and indicative of a recurring problem in human society. The items were as follows:
* International: A report of a third online video of a beheading of a (British) captive by the Islamic terrorist group ISL (or IS, or ISIS). It came with a threat to the British Government to stop their involvement in activities directed against the radicalised group. This follows two previous online videos of US captives - along with threats made to the US Government – and afterwards, subsequent videos of their beheadings.
* National: A report about how some parents were desperately trying to stop their sons - and in some cases daughters - from leaving Australia to join the overseas jihadist movement. Recruiting young people to join the jihad - which includes online material - has become a noted problem. Tens of people from countries like Australia and Britain have already left to join the fighting. The fear is that they will become trained militants, who, after returning home, will introduce terror methods, ideologies, and attacks locally. This has already occurred overseas.
* Domestic: A report about how bullying amongst students in schools has moved into the (online) social media sphere. The situation has become so bad that teachers have had to spend extra time trying to address this new form of bullying.
On the surface, then, all three news items seem to be separate issues - occurring on three different social levels. But the interrelated factor between them all is bullying: that is, a small, but significant, proportion of people possessing a drive to bully others and/or a sense of being bullied themselves.
How does all this come about? It builds in people from unresolved trauma as they grow up - as well as building in cultural groups over generations. It starts with inadequate parenting, where children endure painful experiences in the home at the hands of their parents, guardians, or relatives. This can involve any number of events: neglect, overly strict discipline, lax morals, beltings, or domestic violence between adults (or similar events in institutions, like immigration centres for example). Since such children cannot speak up or fight back against adults, they, instead, act out their pain in schools - in the form of bullying others or allowing themselves to be bullied by others (as a result of possessing unusual characteristic/s, a passive personality, and/or a low sense of self-worth). Over the years, this bullying environment further builds psychoemotional pain in vulnerable people. [What is interesting here is that the new upsurge in online social media bullying has come about despite the introduction of anti-bullying schemes by the government earlier this year - along with trumpeting the fact that they were on top of the bullying problem. What appears to have happened is that the students have merely sidestepped the anti-bullying schemes by going online to wage their campaigns.]
Next we see what experts and politicians have described as "disgruntled" young men and women - some with notable mental health issues - wanting to leave home and join radical groups overseas to fight against a perceived oppressive social regime (usually of the West). The question here is why have these youths become so disgruntled? Because their traumas have been added to by experiences and observations as youths, who have since become participants in adult society. Such experiences can include enduring racism as an ethnic; feeling rejected by society through being unemployed; or having to do menial tasks and/or being ordered about by bosses. Additionally, such negative observations of how adult society operates can be influenced by things like racism and prejudice; sledging and dominating opponents in professional sports; reports of killings in the news; government spying revelations against their own citizens; and corruption in social leaders (in the current Australian inquiry, a dozen or so state and federal politicians have had to step down from their positions, over backroom wheelings-and-dealings with wealthy businesspeople).
So, to a small percentage of people having grown up under a regime of trauma, hurt, and bullying, all of these experiences and observations can add up to a lack of trust in the social system. They can develop a sense that the world is an oppressive place where they feel subjugated, and without prospects for improvement of their lot in life in the future.
And now we come to the last step, where we see the end result of a build up of a lifetime of psychoemotional pain: similarly-afflicted people coming together to form an aggressive, violent, radicalised group that want to establish their own "homeland", where they can seek freedom, a sense of self-worth, social acceptance, greater future prospects, and autonomy. But by this stage, their perception of such freedoms and opportunities has become grossly warped, and they try to obtain such attributes via a violent tirade.
More News
Amazingly, just a few days later, on the 18th of September, the morning news updated these same three items – again, in separately-presented fashion:
* International: The US President admitted that US troops would need to fight in combat in order to defeat ISL. This comes after the Australian Prime Minister made the same admission regarding Australian troops.
* National: The police conducted dawn raids in Sydney and Brisbane to arrest people allegedly planning terrorist attacks in Australia.
* Domestic: To combat the upsurge in online school bullying, the government will introduce fines against social media websites that do not remove material reported as objectionable.
Conducting police raids against alleged terrorists is good protection for society – but it is waiting to the very last minute to take any action. This is a gamble that can easily fail and lead to troubled people “falling through the cracks” to launch violence on unsuspecting citizens. It would be more effective to work at the other end of the scale – at the problem's source: in childhood and during upbringing, to prevent people from developing a disgruntled and violent disposition in the first place. And do you think social media fines will stop bullying? Not a chance! Students will just find another way to conduct it.
Radicalised movements - like the jihad - can be seen as extreme act-outs of bullying - complete with threats, intimidation, intolerance of others' views, and acts of aggression. These are attributes we first see appear (in a less intense form) in schools, and then later on as fringe activities in social fields like sport, business, and politics. The militants are acting out their rage of being bullied and suppressed during upbringing - in homes lacking in parenting skills, then in schools unable to deal with bullying, and finally in a society where the downtrodden and disadvantaged are in one sense still working to support the well-off. It is all interlinked and this recurring social problem can only be resolved with an interlinked mental health science. Is this all too hard to believe? Just take a look at one example.
The (not-so) Perfect Terrorist
The life of convicted terrorist, David Coleman Headley (known as “India's Osama bin Laden”), involved numerous traumas. They included emigration (from the US to Pakistan), parental divorce, and his school's bombing by India (all at a young age); racial labeling (when growing up); and jail time (as an adult). Eventually, he became the coordinator of a terrorist attack against a hotel, that saw 166 people killed. And where was the hotel? In India (Headley admitted that for him this was a revenge attack for his school's bombing, and Pakistan's humiliating defeat in that war). And who did he dob-in as his alleged accomplice? A Pakistani man he met in military high school (subsequently convicted of aiding terrorism). His terror attack was an act-out of unresolved trauma that had occurred 37 years previous – whereas most people would have moved on from that event. Not all terrorists will have school connections like his – but the point is that the urge to support radicalised groups starts young, with unresolved trauma that continues to build during upbringing.
http://www.propublica.org/article/david-headley-homegrown-terrorist
[The above mechanism also explains why fighting between neighbouring societies – like Israel and Palestine for example – tends to rumble on for years in a stop-start fashion. It is because each generation contains people traumatised by the violence - some of whom grow up to move on, while others become consumed with revenge attacks.]
The Future of Terrorism
We can see where all of this disgruntlement and radicalisation is likely to lead. Throughout history there have been many examples of radicalised groups waging war against social regimes. But globalisation has brought with it such radicalised activity into the global arena. It reached a peak with the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center in the US. Since that event, its terrorist perpetrator - al Qaeda - has been subdued by greater powers. But after them ISL has since emerged - well-funded, and even more intense and radicalised than al Qaeda (who even distanced themselves from ISL's shockingly violent activities). There is no doubt that Western Powers will also subdue ISL – with the loss of numerous soldiers' lives – though experts note that they are unlikely to extinguish the radicalised flame. So, in future years, it is likely that new and even more violent groups will emerge. And inevitably they will obtain weapons of mass destruction - such as "dirty bombs". At that time, the world will enter into a new phase of radicalised terrorism. There will no longer be individual captives put up for ransom and to aid threats; there will, instead, be whole cities put up for ransom - in the face of nuclear annihilation. The question will then be, which cities, and how many of them, will have to be obliterated before the world's governments wake up and realise that they do not have all the answers, that what they've been doing for parenting, mental health, and social structures has been ineffective in some key areas, and that they need to change the way that they operate. But the public does not have to wait for more killings to occur before government policy is forced to change. The public can help bring about that change themselves. Below is one way that this can be done.
The Killing of Children by Children
The world – and the US in particular - has recently seen a new development in this area of bullying and violence: the killing of children (i.e., sub-adults) by other children. This has involved both individual murders and school spree killings. As a result, victims' families have sought to sue the parents of the murderous children. (In the case of school massacres, they have also sought to sue the schools for inadequate handling of bullying.) In their view, if those children had received better parenting they would not have become murderers, and their own cherished children would still be alive today. Litigation is not the answer to the problem - but at least people are now beginning to look more discerningly at the real source of violent personality development.
https://au.news.yahoo.com/world/a/24990107/is-it-a-crime-to-raise-a-killer
[Interestingly, there has been good research into the motivations of spree killers. With regard to US school killings, “87% of school shooters claimed or left behind evidence of them being victims of bullying”. And for US spree killings as a whole (school, military, workplace, etc.), the majority of the perpetrators (52%) were white people. This latter fact indicates that the problem of disgruntled spree killers lies within the home-grown culture itself. For example, there are too many pressures in modern society: to achieve grades in school, to work in a fast-paced workforce, and to keep up with a high cost of living - to name a few.]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_shooting
Yet, child murder victims' families could go even further. They could also consider suing the murderers' respective governments. This is because governments persist in operating an ineffective mental health system, that follows brief “snapshots” of evidence, deals in coping mechanisms, and prescribes medicinal drugs. This system is helpful to some, but ultimately serves only to keep traumas subdued and unresolved. It also has a social side that is equally ineffective in changing human behaviour on a larger scale - as is seen in the failure to improve parenting practices or stop bullying in schools. The following examples typify the disarray in the mental health system:
New Scientist magazine recently published an author interview about a book that champions the success of Cognitive Behaviour and other therapies, as well as evidence-based science. The authors claim that just 10-16 hours of treatment was enough for the patients' recovery to last for the rest of their lives. This was said to be a “revolution”.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22329770.200-know-this-the-latest-psychotherapy-transforms-lives.html
But the story has been different over at Nature magazine. It has published several articles complaining that current treatments – including Cognitive Behaviour Therapy – were not effective enough. One article states: “...evidence-based psychological treatments need improvement. Although the majority of patients benefit, only about half experience a clinically meaningful reduction in symptoms or full remission, at least for the most common conditions...Moreover, despite progress, we do not yet fully understand how psychological therapies work — or when they don't.”
http://www.nature.com/news/psychological-treatments-a-call-for-mental-health-science-1.15541
If conventional therapists don't know how or when their therapies work (or not), then what are they practicing? And what is their scientific guide for treatment?
Another article declares that the situation is even worse for suicidal tendencies: ”Despite its enormous societal impact, little progress has been made in the scientific understanding or treatment of suicidal behaviour...the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders...does not code suicidal behaviour — the most prominent emergency in psychiatry in primary care. Suicidality is perceived as a medical complication rather than as a disorder in its own right.”
http://www.nature.com/news/mental-health-a-road-map-for-suicide-research-and-prevention-1.15245
The question that comes to mind here is, how are government-supported help lines treating suicidal people if its medical arm - and, by default, its own health department – doesn't even recognise suicide as a mental health issue (on paper at least)? When one sees a steady stream of the rich-and-famous dying from their inner demons, even after having been to mental health treatments (including Philip Seymour Hoffman, Charlotte Dawson, Peaches Geldof, and Robin Williams) one doesn't need long-term clinical studies to know that those treatments are ineffective for serious depressive conditions. And when one sees a similar stream of famous people dying after self-medicating themselves (including Heath Ledger, Michael Jackson, and Whitney Houston) it confirms the confusion in society over what constitutes a medical problem and what constitutes a psychological one.
Overall, then, how can a group of mental health therapies – supported by government, universities, and charitable organisations – be considered to be greater than sliced bread one minute, then a work-in-progress the next? I'll tell you how: this type of swinging sentiment is characteristic of a body of work that is stuck at a preliminary stage of development. In contrast, the laws of pain has gone way past the preliminaries. It uses a definitive set of laws – instead of transient evidence - that explain how human evolution developed, how human suffering works, and can heal accumulated psychoemotional trauma. It is a more effective system, that also has a social side that could introduce schemes to gradually improve parenting and resolve bullying behaviour.
Governments' failure to update mental health science, and neglect to heal accumulated trauma, means that they are allowing troubled and violent people to prosper. So victims of violence could still be alive today but for the inaction of such governments. That makes governments partly liable for the deaths of such victims. Legal action is one way to make governments realise that they are not performing to the public's expectations. Victims' families do not have to suffer in vain; they have the potential to help change government policy and stop this never-ending cycle of bullying and violence, and to make the world a safer, and far better, place.
References:
"A Perfect Terrorist", (video), PBS Frontline and ProPublica, producer Tom Jennings, 2011.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/david-headley
http://www.propublica.org/article/david-headley-homegrown-terrorist
"School shooting", Wikipedia, (online), Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., last modified on 8 September 2014 at 20:39,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_shooting
Liz Else, "Know this: the latest psychotherapy transforms lives", interview with book authors Richard Layard and David Clark, New Scientist, (online), Reed Business Information Ltd., Magazine issue 2977, 15 July 2014,
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22329770.200-know-this-the-latest-psychotherapy-transforms-lives.html
Emily A. Holmes, Michelle G. Craske, & Ann M. Graybiel, "Psychological treatments: A call for mental-health science", Nature, (online), Nature Publishing Group, 16 July 2014,
http://www.nature.com/news/psychological-treatments-a-call-for-mental-health-science-1.15541
André Aleman & Damiaan Denys, "Mental health: A road map for suicide research and prevention", Nature, (online), Nature Publishing Group, 21 May 2014,
http://www.nature.com/news/mental-health-a-road-map-for-suicide-research-and-prevention-1.15245
Editorial, "Suicide watch", Nature, (online), Nature Publishing Group, 12 February 2014,
http://www.nature.com/news/suicide-watch-1.14691
Lisa Belkin Yahoo7, "Is it a crime to raise a killer?", Yahoo7 News, (online), Yahoo7, September 15, 2014, 6:58 am
https://au.news.yahoo.com/world/a/24990107/is-it-a-crime-to-raise-a-killer
