One Eye Open: Mental health blind spot in counterterror efforts

Chief editor Nicholas Dynon writes that established punitive approaches by government to individuals exhibiting lone actor terrorist behaviours are not necessarily making us safer.

Ahamed Aathill Mohamed Samsudeen, the 32-year-old ISIS sympathiser who stabbed six people before being shot dead in an Auckland supermarket on 3rd September is New Zealand’s latest ‘terrorist’. While the terrorist label may fit, history tells us that it’s not particularly helpful.

There are, according to various studies, over 200 definitions of terrorism. They are academically contested, often legally convoluted, frequently politically appropriated, sometimes emotively deployed, and inevitably prone to obsolescence. As a rule of thumb, they tend not to be particularly helpful.

And New Zealand is no exception to this rule. The Counter-Terrorism Legislation Bill currently before Parliament is seeking to address inadequacies in the Terrorism Suppression Act 2002 (TSA), including amending the legal definition of ‘terrorist act’.

According to the Ministry of Justice, terrorism has evolved since the TSA was drafted in the early 2000s. The TSA, it states, “predominantly responds to the threat posed by organised terrorist entities and groups rather than a fuller range of terrorist activities, such as attacks that involve lone actors and low-sophistication.”

The ‘fuller range of terrorist activities’, however, is potentially a very long list. Similarly, the ‘terrorist’ label itself encompasses a range of actors that has broadened over time, from terrorist organisations, militant groups and rebel fighters, to violent extremists, lone actors, radicalised offenders, disgruntled petitioners and fixated persons.

In Samsudeen’s case, it would appear that beyond the general categorisation of ‘terrorist’, there is some consensus among commentators that he was a ‘lone wolf’ or, less pejoratively, a ‘lone actor’. Although we again face the difficulty of multiple contested definitions, lone wolf terrorism may be described as involving a single perpetrator acting without direct support in the planning, preparation and execution of an attack, and whose decision to act is not directed by any group or other individuals.

Understanding the LynnMall terrorist as a lone actor is important because research has identified characteristics in relation to this particular category of terrorist that distinguishes it from others, including – importantly – in terms of the role played by mental health.

The mental health connection

On 15 December 2014, Man Horan Monis held 18 people at gunpoint inside the Lindt café in Sydney, a siege that resulted in the deaths of two captives and Monis himself. It ultimately transpired that Monis was acting independently – a lone actor – and that he had serious mental health problems.

A 2015 Study by Corner and Gill of 119 lone actors in Europe and the US found that 32 percent had been diagnosed with a mental illness, whereas organised terrorist groups had a relatively low prevalence of mental illness, with only 3.4 percent of those studied having psychiatric diagnoses. They found that the odds of a lone actor having a mental illness is 13.49 times higher than the odds of a group actor having a mental illness.

A 2020 study by Morris and Meloy of 23 lone actors referred to authorities as posing a national security risk from a county in Scotland found that 39 percent had previous psychiatric contact.

In his 2019 study of security sector practitioner perceptions of the terror threat environment before the Christchurch attacks, Massey University’s Dr John Battersby noted that mental health conditions and ‘fixations’ featured prominently as a major source of concern of practitioners in relation to ‘at-risk individuals’.

Published in the National Security Journal just days prior to the LynnMall attack, an article by Massey University Alumna Josinta Tillett, provides the most comprehensive picture yet of the characteristics of lone actors in New Zealand. Her paper, “Understanding Lone-Actor Terrorists: The Global Context and How it can be Applied to New Zealand”, also notes the prevalence of mental illness within this cohort.

Summarising eight significant international studies that analyse a range of lone-actor terrorist characteristics or indicators from Europe, the US, or both, Tillett notes that actors are overwhelmingly male, usually aged in their 30s, always hold a radical ideology, probably suffer a personal grievance, are dependent on the internet, are socially isolated, usually have intimacy issues, often have mental health problems, have average to high education levels, often suffer employment problems, and often have a prior criminal history.

Tillett’s analysis of the characteristics of seven New Zealand lone actors found that there were both similarities and differences between the international and New Zealand results, including higher mental health rates within the New Zealand cohort. Five out of the seven lone actors were identified as having mental health issues, with one ‘possible’ and one ‘unknown’.

Using anonymised Police data of suspected potential lone-actor cases alongside anonymised data relating to general offenders who had been charged with serious violence offences in the five years to December 2018, Tillet found that there were relatively higher mental health/suicide figures in relation to the possible lone actors (29 versus 19 percent).

Love, truth, and mutual respect - the late Dr Rob Roche.

The mental health gap

Corner and Gill note that their abovementioned findings “suggest a need for revisiting the issue of mental illness as a part of the process for some people becoming involved in terrorism.” Furthermore, they note that mental illness mechanisms “remain systematically unexamined, and there may be grounds to pursue a more concrete understanding of how mental illness and psychological processes influence an individual’s participation in and trajectory through terrorist behaviors.”

Evidently, the LynnMall attacker had a significant mental health history.

Auckland barrister Aarif Rasheed recently told Stuff.co.nz’s Jehan Casinader, “For years, the authorities had treated this man as a terrorist – labelling him a terrorist, and convincing him that he is a terrorist.” Samsudeen had reached out to the defence lawyer in late 2017 while being held in custody after sharing violent content on Facebook.

Having talked with Samsudeen, Rasheed had sought advice from Dr Clarke Jones, a counter-terrorism expert at the Australian National University’s Research School of Psychology specialising in youth interventions, radicalisation, correctional reform, terrorist offenders and prison gangs.

“As it was, law enforcement treated him exclusively as a violent extremist, with no apparent efforts to address his mental health issues,” Jones wrote in the wake of the attack in The Guardian. “His experience with New Zealand police and the criminal justice system could have triggered his recurring experience of the original trauma, alleging mistreatment or excessive use of force during his time in the NZ criminal justice system.”

“The tragedy of 3 September shows that traditional law enforcement strategies to address extremism are not the only solution,” he continued. “We must urgently consider and try alternative approaches that seek to address causal factors.”

In 2015, I had the pleasure of interviewing the late Dr Rob Roche for an article on countering violent extremism in the New Zealand Security Magazine. A member of the New Zealand Peace Foundation, Roche was a retired Auckland-based medical practitioner who had previously led ground-breaking work with patients suffering from alcoholism and serious drug addiction.

It was just months after Parliament’s December 2014 passing of the Countering Terrorist Fighters Legislation Bill, which had given the NZSIS greater surveillance powers and the Minister of Internal Affairs greater powers to suspend and cancel passports. Although acknowledging the role of security and law enforcement, it was Roche’s opinion that the then National Government was approaching the issue of violent extremism with one eye open.

“To be effective, any program for the rehabilitation of extremists must be based on love, truth, trust and mutual respect”, he insisted. “It will have a better chance of success if it is non-judgmental and where there are no elements of confrontation or fear of physical punishment or condemnation.”

These were brave words. Love, truth, trust and mutual respect were not ideas with which one might have expected the New Zealand Government to have approached people exhibiting extremist tendencies. National’s approach was firmly around deportation, passport cancellation, incarceration and, failing these, surveillance… and this hasn’t changed under Labour.

From the many that existed overseas, Roche singled out a program in Germany that had been in operation since 2011 and had at that point dealt with almost 500 cases. The Hayat (Arabic for ‘life’) program was supervised by Daniel Kohler, director of the German Institute of Radicalisation and De-radicalisation and a leading figure in counter-extremism.

“Kohler stresses the importance of treating a radicalised individual as a patient,” explained Roche, “so that appropriate psychological counselling and other specialised services can be provided when needed.” The identification of the at-risk person as someone ‘in need’ rather than a mere target of state surveillance or law enforcement is a key ingredient for Roche. “The object”, he stressed, “is to generate a sense of wellbeing and self-worth so that the patient is well equipped to find a rewarding place in society.”

Roche passed away in his 91st year last January. One of my enduring memories of the doctor was accompanying him during Ramadan to an iftar (breaking of the fast) at the then Auckland University of Technology Mosque. He had wanted to meet with Muslims to learn more about their lives and beliefs. He sat awestruck during the maghrib prayer, and afterwards ate together with the Imam and the hands of several others from the same plate.

Six years later, authorities still appear wedded to the type of securitised, punitive approach to atrisk individuals favoured several years ago. That approach didn’t work for lone actor Samsudeen, nor his victims, and ultimately it’s unlikely to work in future.

Nicholas Dynon is chief editor of Line of Defence Magazine, and a widely published commentator on New Zealand’s defence, national security and private security sectors.