Clinical characteristics of a sample of 90 detainees for jihadist terrorism

Introduction

Although research into the process of jihadist radicalization has developed in less than 10 years, few studies on the subject have been carried out by psychiatrists, and the prevalence of psychiatric disorders among people incarcerated for terrorism in France is unknown. Our objectives were to estimate the prevalence of psychiatric disorders in a sample of people incarcerated for jihadist terrorism and to characterize and compare men and women (socio-demographics, psychiatric diagnoses, trauma, substances, conversion to Islam).

Method

Ninety adults in detention for jihadist terrorism were included; the data used were extracted from the patient file (gender, age, marital and parental status, level of education, employment, history of specialized follow-up) and from clinical interviews conducted by the same interviewer (history of depression, suicide attempt, psychiatric follow-up, psychotropic medication use, psychiatric hospitalization, current ICD-10 psychiatric diagnosis, substance abuse and withdrawal, trauma, lone or in group terrorism). Categorical variables were described with proportions, and qualitative variables with means, medians and standard deviations. Comparisons were made between men and women using the t-Student test (comparisons of means) or the Chi² (comparisons of proportions). Analyses were performed using R Studio software.

Results

30% of incarcerated people had a current psychiatric diagnosis. The most frequent diagnosis was “personality disorder” (11%), followed by “schizophrenia, schizotypal disorders and delusional disorders” (8%) and “neurotic and stress-related disorders and somatoform disorders” (6%). Women had a higher lifetime history of depression and psychiatric follow-up than men, but men were more likely to have a current psychiatric diagnosis. The marital and parental status of men and women also differed: men were better socially integrated, with higher levels of education and access to employment. Women were more likely to have been taken into care by the child welfare system, to have family responsibilities, and to be divorced or widowed. Men were much more likely than women to engage in addictive behaviors and were also much more likely to wean themselves from their substance use. Women had a very high prevalence of trauma, sexual violence and/or domestic or marital violence which was not the case for men. The phenomenon of conversion to Islam concerned a large and identical proportion of men and women. Finally, for the first time in the literature on the subject our study explored the link between male lone actors and the prevalence of psychiatric pathology (90%) and found a very significant association between being a lone actor and having a psychiatric diagnosis.

Conclusion

Our study thus contributes to the development of new criteria for the detection, assessment and management of people radicalized and committing acts of jihadist terrorism.