As we begin to gain some distance from the tragedy at Ft. Hood and take a tour of media and blog responses, three things become apparent. First, our military is clearly ignoring its mental health needs; second, many groundlessly assume that religion must have played a role in the massacre; and third, ill-conceived rhetoric can infect our military culture, with potentially disturbing results.
Mental Health Breakdown
As others have noted, on-base attacks are increasingly common, due in part to the insufficient attention given to the mental health needs of the military. Multiple tours of duty, living under constant fire, and the fear of serving under these conditions, all contribute to mental instability. They, in turn, inhibit recruiting, reduce the overall quality of recruits, and even effect the readiness of the armed forces in general. In a recent New York Times story on the topic, Army chief of staff Gen. George Casey said:
“We’ve also worked very, very hard to enhance what we’re doing to—for the mental fitness of the force,” he said on Meet the Press. He cited a “stigma reduction program” started in 2007 that “resulted in about a 40 percent increase in soldiers willing to come forward saying they have some symptoms of post-traumatic stress.”He said that last year the suicide rate exceeded the civilian rate for the first time and as a result the Army is spending $5 million to have the National Institute of Health study the problem. More recently, he said, the Army has started a program called Comprehensive Soldier Fitness designed to give soldiers skills “to build the resilience to deal with some of the challenges that they’re facing.”
Although Maj. Nidal Hasan never served in a conflict zone, he apparently did have mental health issues. The New York Times has a lengthy piece on the psychological cost on health care providers, noting that:
Providing care has its own risks. In studies of therapists working to soothe mental distress in victims of violence, whether criminal, sexual or combat-related, researchers have documented what is called secondary trauma: contact distress, of a kind. In one 2004 study of social workers on cases stemming from the Sept. 11 attacks, researchers found that the more deeply therapists were involved with victims, the more likely they were to experience such trauma. The same associations have been found in doctors working with survivors in war zones.
Still, “mental health evaluations of therapists themselves were virtually nonexistent.” This lack of support for caregivers stresses an already fragile system. These professionals “describe crushing schedules with 10 or more patients a day, most struggling with devastating trauma or mutilated bodies that are the product of war and the highly advanced care that kept them alive.”
Islam Responsible?
Even with all this background information readily available and a call from Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) “that we take the time to gather all the facts, as it would be irresponsible to be the source of rumors or inaccurate information regarding such a horrific event,” Maj. Hasan’s religion immediately became a dominant part of the narrative. Over at The Atlantic, Andrew Sullivan writes that:
I did not leap to that conclusion in this case as the primary reason for the attack because we didn’t fully know the entire picture—and still don’t. But as the pieces fall into place, it seems increasingly clear that Nidal Hasan’s faith—and the conflicts it presented in the context of the war on Islamist terror—was absolutely relevant in this horrifying massacre of service members.
Sullivan essentially makes two points: 1) We do not know everything about Hasan, but 2) it is becoming clear he did this because of his faith.
I fail to understand how, at this point, we can argue both that we need more information, but that it is “increasingly clear” that his faith is a meaningful issue. It’s quite possible that Hasan is mentally ill and chose to use Islam to express that illness the way a Christian may believe he’s hearing the voice of Jesus. In both cases they are turning to comfortable cultural idioms to express the confusion in their heads. No one holds Jodie Foster responsible for the violence of John Hinckley, Jr.
Also in The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg writes:
I do think that elite makers of opinion in this country try very hard to ignore the larger meaning of violent acts when they happen to be perpetrated by Muslims. Here’s a simple test: If Nidal Malik Hasan had been a devout Christian with pronounced anti-abortion views, and had he attacked, say, a Planned Parenthood office, would his religion have been considered relevant as we tried to understand the motivation and meaning of the attack? Of course.
While Hasan appears to be a Muslim he’s also a graduate of Virginia Tech, site of the deadliest peacetime attack on America by a single gunman. Since an equal number of Virginia Tech students and American-born Muslims have gone on killing sprees, Goldberg should clearly be asking to investigate Virginia Tech’s mental health support structures. Or perhaps, using Goldberg’s logic, we should investigate whether East Asian men have a propensity to mass murder, given the ethnicity both of the Virginia Tech and Binghamton shooters. Fortunately, one of Sullivan’s readers injects some sanity into the whole conversation:
The reason elite opinion makers are reticent to too strongly overplay the religion card with Nidal Hasan, in a way they maybe weren’t as reticent to do with George Tiller, is because Islam is a minority faith and many of its practitioners might well be subject to retaliatory violence in the wake of Fort Hood. To “apply the same standard of inquiry and criticism to all religions” omits the important fact that there are a great many people in this country who would NOT apply the same standard to Hasan as they applied to George Tiller. They might say that Tiller was a bad apple in an otherwise good faith, while simultaneously saying Hasan is the apple that proves the badness of the whole batch. To pretend otherwise is obvious and repugnant sophistry.
Zeenat Rehman makes a more direct observation about this sort of overdetermination in the Chicago Tribune:
Tags: andrew sullivan, ft hood, islam, islamophobia, jeffrey goldberg, major nidal hasan, military, muslims, ptsd, seung hui-cho, the atlantic, virginia tech
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