Is my psychiatrist a terrorist?

While the author Claudia Johnson takes the admirable line in her full article of analysing her own short-comings, and the possibilities to cultural bias and racism, we must also point out the odd link to crime at the international level.

For example, Radovan Karadzic is the Sarajevo psychiatrist who lit the fires of racism in the Balkans. Karadzic's patient, Slobovan Milosovic, continued ethnic cleansing.

The chief advisor to Osama Bin Laden, the admitted terrorist behind the 9/11 attack on America, is a psychiatrist trained in psychological techniques, and capable of using drugs and other mental techniques to create suicide-bombers convinced of the glory of sacrifice and dying.

And then we come to the question seen on Counter Punch here:

Doctors involved in London terror plot!

Registrar at a Gold Coast Hospital arrested at Brisbane airport!

The thought hit right when I heard the radio news: Is my psychiatrist a terrorist?

Criminal profiling has found that young professionals from good backgrounds, often engineers, (and now doctors), living away from their home countries were typical terrorists. Workmates usually describe them as model citizens.

On the first visit to my psychiatrists' fusty consulting room, some Islamic pictures on the wall suggested to me that his background was other than Christian. He came from a country where Islam was the majority religion. But as our relationship needed to be scrupulously professional I knew it was inappropriate to engage him in chat. Curious as I am about most peoples' lives, this was one person who must remain a mystery to me.

I moved right along to the serious problems in the world: my feelings. My depression, my sense of failure at not having won a Nobel or a Booker prize. My husbands' Narcissistic Personality Disorder. My problems wrestling with the constant upkeep of the McMansion. I was so middle-aged, so disempowered. My suffering was immense and my depression was assessed as serious and chronic--requiring a high dose of anti-depressants.

[...]

I always wondered how we all must appear to him: us spoilt fortunate Westerners, suffering the curse of Western culture--depression. Did he secretly despise us, as we poured out our pathetic innermost secrets? Could he not, possibly, even begin to hate us? That would be understandable.

In the country my psychiatrist came from, most people live hand to mouth, they sleep under cardboard. Even under our organic feather doonas after our Sleepy Time Tea in silk teabags drunk from our fine china mugs many of us can't get to sleep, we have so many worries, so much stress. This is one of the thoughts that troubles me when I can't get to sleep: as we order newer, wider flat screen televisions, aren't we like Marie Antoinette before the French Revolution? And most of the luxuries with which we pamper ourselves--our fine china, embroidered sheets, our soft fluffy pajamas-- aren't they made by underpaid workers cruelly repressed in Third World countries? Yes they are, that's why they are so cheap, and that's why we can afford to buy so much stuff.

In the second year when I saw him again after the summer break I asked, "How was your holiday, did you go to Queensland? " We had been getting personal to the extent that we exchanged summaries of holiday plans.

"No," he said, "I went on a group pilgrimage to Mecca."

What a barbecue-stopper! I was taken aback big-time. Having met people who have been just about every single place in the world including the top of Everest and the tip of Patagonia, a Mecca pilgrimage was a first.To my fascination I realised I was still unsophisticated and a racist that I felt some sort fear of what is fashionably called "the Other". But I did not want him to sense this, to feel hurt or insulted, or not accepted.I did not want him to think I was one of those crass John Laws-worshipping Aussies discombobulated by anything other than the straight-forward love of ball sports even though I was much closer to being that than I had realised. And I couldn't ask: "How was the food?" or "Did you have a lovely hotel?"

But as I was curious, I said, "Can I ask you what were the other pilgrims saying about what they feel about Australia and the reactions here to Islam?" (The usual debates had been going on.The usual ill-chosen mullahs had been making ill-chosen remarks to which all sorts of unhelpful responses were made. The whole scenario was a mess.)

"They were not talking about Australia" he replied," All they thought about was God, and asking forgiveness from Him."

Right. OK.

So on hearing that Islamic doctors practising in the West were apparently involved in the latest terrorist bombing attempts, I thought about Dr Ali. And wondered, just for a second, could my psychiatrist be a terrorist?

[...]

The training techniques used to trained terrorists harken back to the very effective techniques of the Cult of the Assassins, who drugged young men, and took them to what they were told was paradise, complete with 72 beautiful virgins to meet their every need. Of course, in order to achieve paradise, all they had to do was to kill a certain prince, etc., and die in the process.

Modern psychiatric techniques have likely improved on all of this in the training of young jihadists. The problem is that psychiatric training does not effectively address these kinds of questions of morality, otherwise we would not see heightened statistics of crime and criminality in their membership.