Healthy individuals can have difficulty imagining that terrorists who commit unspeakable atrocities don’t have a mental illness. Surely, they must have experienced terrible trauma, even complex trauma. Yet, research seeking to establish a connection between terrorism and mental illness has largely come up empty-handed.

To effectively address terrorism, we first need to understand what exactly terrorism is, what causes it, and how (or if) mental illness plays a role in terrorism.

Terrorism refers to the calculated use of violence or intimidation (the threat of violence) that is:

Practically, this means that terrorism involves a real danger, or threats of actual danger, directed at a targeted population or audience implemented for maximum impact.

Terrorism often uses psychological warfare and manipulation of both conventional media and social media platforms to evoke fear and terror in a large target audience. By threatening further and perhaps even more brutal attacks against which the target audience feels helpless and unprotected, terrorist organizations seek to maximize their impact. The greater the brutality of the acts and the less predictable the terrorists, the greater their impact will be.

Thought-out, premeditated plans by terror organizations are different than spontaneous outbursts of uncontrolled rage committed by individuals.

Many of the terrorist attacks that we see today involve multiple participants at different hierarchical tiers of terrorist organizations, including the “masterminds” who plan the logistics of the terrorist attacks. Often, the leadership does not have a hands-on role in actual attacks. Many terror groups espouse a type of martyrdom of those willing to endanger or sacrifice themselves for the cause while protecting the safety of higher-ranking, more respected group members.

The media and the mental health profession have questioned whether or not individuals who commit terrorist activities suffer from diagnosable psychiatric disorders. The most relevant........

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