Description:
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.
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. Kamaldeep Bhui, Queen Mary University of London:In this impressive and provocative volume, Aggarwal reveals many hidden failings of dominant social and political thought on radicalization and terrorism. Bioethics, arabic science, and symptoms in Guantanamo detainees are all debated to present an alternative, rounded, and compelling approach that includes medicine and cultural psychiatry as essential actors. Sarah Pinto, Tufts University:A clear and impassioned discussion of the presence of psychiatrists and mental-health knowledge practices in the micro-functioning of the War on Terror and the impact of each on the other. The book is a compelling portrayal of the way that medicine and its scientific languages and knowledge structures are able to move through and across political domains, being put to use to challenge and undo the very power structures they are meant to serve. Engaging, rigorous, and beautifully written. Arthur Kleinman, Harvard University:Aggarwal has written a theoretically sophisticated, multisided exploration of how the War on Terror and mental health are powerfully connected through the 'culture' of psychiatry, psychoanalysis, hospitals, courts, the military, and Islam. His argument is that science, religion, and moral experience are not just infiltrated with cultural meanings but come to create new cultural forms such as 'trauma,' forensic processes, and 'terrorism,' which in turn remake the world. An important a