The Annals of April (it's my newsletter and I'll alliterate awfully if I want to)
On trauma management, DFV, cultural safety and racism in the psychology profession, lone-actor violence, the relationship between mental illness and offending + the usual.
I initially had this titled the ‘awesome annals of April’, but it hasn’t been awesome at all, has it? While violence continues to wreak havoc across the globe, it also intruded into our little corner of the world via the Bondi Westfield attack in such a catastrophic way.
I’ve been reflecting on how desensitised I am to violence now. When these attacks happened I used to be shocked, horrified, scared and saddened. Now, I just feel sadness, but there’s no more shock, horror, or even fear. This is likely because I read so many offending narratives and assess/treat many people who harbour violent/homicidal ideation, and the possibility of an attack like what we’ve seen does not seem remote or unfathomable at all to me. Despite this I do not move through the world with fear, because I also know that lone-actor attacks like Bondi are incredibly rare, and the odds of being caught in an attack by a stranger are minuscule (you are much more likely to have a car accident than be involved in a violent incident like this).
Working in the field provides knowledge, and through that a (possibly illusory?) sense of control. We often seek a why when something like this happens, but it’s really too early to build a full picture of possible factors/failures which resulted in this attack.
For those affected, ‘what now’ might be a more helpful question to focus on.
Trauma management principles
When managing traumatic exposure like this it’s so important to get the basics right. Strong reactions and distress after a trauma are entirely normal. We need to know how to process this to ensure this distress does not become ‘stuck’ and manifest as a post-traumatic syndrome. I always recommend a few simple post-trauma management principles:
Eat well, sleep enough, and move your body. Like I said, the basics.
Don’t pile too much pressure onto yourself. If you’ve witnessed or been involved in a traumatic event then take time off work if you need. Expect less of yourself overall. Part of your brain will be off-line as it processes the trauma, allow it to be.
Ensure you don’t consume too much media about the event. There’s likely nothing to be gained from it.
Talk to people about what happened and what you witnessed/experienced. Social support is really important, ideally from people who won’t tell you to ‘get over it’ or some such unhelpful and dismissive advice. Equally, you don’t want to be wrapped in cotton wool. Sensible advice and support (but not rescuing) is important.
Don’t blame yourself, or move into shame and guilt. Instead, feel the natural feelings of shock, sadness, anger, horror, fear. There’s likely little you could have done to prevent the trauma, and shame and guilt are unhelpful.
Watch for self-blame (e.g., ‘this happened because I drove down that road’). Try and challenge these cognitions (‘how was I to know?’) and watch for typical cognitive distortions (mind reading, emotional reasoning, jumping to conclusions, overgeneralising, catastrophising).
Use body based emotion release techniques like swimming, yoga, massage, or crying to release and move stress through the body.
Know that you will have some difficult experiences, such as dreams/nightmares, or intrusive thoughts and memories. This is just your brain making sense of the events and this process needs to occur. It will likely settle with time.
If difficulties persist more than a month after witnessing/experiencing an event, then it’ll be helpful to seek professional support, and your GP will usually be the first point of contact. There are excellent therapies available for trauma and it’s important to seek support sooner rather than later.
Domestic and family violence deaths
I also want to acknowledge that there have also recently so many recent intimate partner homicide deaths which have rocked Australian women. Unsure about the men, they seem to be notably silent about this issue. We know that the risk to women is within the home and is most often directed from a cisgender male partner/former partner. Thousands of women are going to rally this weekend and I hope that this starts to catalyse some change and ensures that governments at both the federal and state level start to view this with the seriousness they do other forms of crime. For too long management of DFV/IPV has been left to women and women’s services. Instead, the focus needs to be changing the behaviour of perpetrators and providing wrap-around supports for the most high-risk offenders, just as we do with other offences.
I support most of Jess Hill’s suggestion here (with the exception of regulating the porn industry, because as far as I know no research to date has shown links between porn and violence/sexual violence). I’d also add a few other suggestions: considering some form of multi-agency work for the most high risk perpetrators, a register (for policing use only, not publicly available) of the most high-risk offenders like the SORA, moving away from IVOs as the sole management mechanism (IVOs are civil orders only and are likely very little deterrent for the more antisocial/motivated offender), and paying closer attention to intersecting needs around homelessness, personality disorder, mental illness, substance use and disability — AND funding services to support perpetrators with these needs. We also need a lot more research into appropriate interventions for DFV because the current men’s behaviour change models have very little positive outcome data behind them.
There’s a long way to go, and it is sickening that we need to keep having these conversations with no action by those who can effect change. As a woman and a psychologist who works with both offenders and victim-survivors, I feel saddened, angry, and helpless.
Cultural safety in psychology
I attended an excellent workshop run by Vanessa Edwige and Mary Goslett from the Australian Indigenous Psychologists Association on cultural safety and indigenous psychology. We also have two additional online seminars with them focused on risk assessment and therapeutic approaches in May and June. I’ve done some cultural safety training before and have largely found it to be superficial in nature (though I acknowledge that perhaps I wasn’t in the right place to receive this information). This workshop however was stellar. Mary and Vanessa reintroduced me to the concept of SEWB (social and emotional well-being) and discussed the harms being done to First Nations people, and the recent history of state-sanctioned racism and policing-led intervention, such as the intervention in the NT. I felt shaken, sad and distressed as I watched some of the videos they showed us. We are all complicit in this ongoing racism, and psychology has directly contributed to harm being done to many people because of our cultural blindness and our insistence on upholding certain types of knowledge and ways of doing therapy over others.
It’s so important to acknowledge that psychology and psychiatry are western, white, colonial models of health. I’m certainly not going to throw the baby out with the bathwater because they are incredibly valuable models and have demonstrably helped many people. However, there is space to consider how we can make interventions more culturally informed and sensitive, and to ensure that we walk alongside people as we engage in therapy together, instead of insisting that we do therapy to them in a certain model and way that we choose.
Cultural safety is going to be a concept the field of psychology (and I!) grapple with, especially as we tend to prioritise outcomes-based interventions, measured data, and increasingly short-term interventions over any form of relationship building. We don’t really have concepts around healing and thus tend to default to concepts of remission, symptom reduction, and recovery. I don’t purport to have the answers — wiser psychologists than me are doing excellent work in this space — but I am grateful to have the capacity to ask some of these questions as I work to ensure the way I practise psychology is as safe and accessible as can be, for as many as possible, while still doing evidence-based work.
I received a few main takeaways from the workshop. First, the importance of allowing silence, shutting up and listening (their words, not mine!). Second, recognising that simple shifts in practice/understanding are all we need at times (e.g., recognising that lack of eye contact signals respect in some cultures). Third, knowing that it’s really hard to heal in a system which hurts (the forensic system), but that this work is essential. This third point really lodged for me, as I recognise the harms done by the carceral system to many, but can’t see a way around having this system. This is something I think about often and I wonder at times whether I am doing more harm than good. Fourth, unpicking some white supremacist myths about how we approach work (more is better, progress always, never get uncomfortable).
The cooption of mental health knowledge by influencers
I have also noted an increasing trend toward indigenous and other cultural models of healing being co-opted by (usually) white wellness influencers who have discovered somatic therapy (usually after reading one of Gabor Mate’s books) and who have decided that they now know enough about mental health and can package and sell these techniques to heal mental health distress (usually trauma). Cultural appropriation much? This also reminds me a little of the bizarre ‘move into your masculine/feminine’ type stuff that some influencers sell (I sense a diatribe around influencers coming in next month’s newsletter) — this is nothing except regressive gender norms and patriarchy repackaged in a bizarre format to make it appealing to left-leaning people.
Pls make it stop.
Trauma recovery is a very complex concept and almost always requires both top-down and bottom-up processing. Rocking or humming alone will likely have little impact on PTSD/CPTSD (also, the evidence for humming is non-existent) and it’s exploitative to sell desperate people untested interventions with the promise that these will heal, especially if these interventions come from a certain culture and context and you are removing these from that context and re-packaging for sale without permission and without any benefit to the communities these interventions came from.
This is probably a key point of difference between (most) psychologists and unregulated professions. As part of our code of ethics we need to use interventions which have evidence behind them, ensure that we don’t overstate the benefits of what we provide, ensure we don’t promise a cure (because we can’t know what intervention will help someone), advertise ethically (this is why we aren’t allowed to use testimonials), and must help a client find alternative care if their difficulties sit outside our scope of practice.
Simple concepts, but really important ones.
SLOW CRIME SUNDAYS
(Disclaimer: As a registered psychologist, I cannot provide diagnoses or commentary about mental health unless I have seen a client, and if I have seen someone, then I cannot speak about them publicly for obvious reasons. What I present in this section are general thoughts only, and these musings are not intended to be seen as clinical advice. I’ll be picking out cases and using them as a way to springboard into discussions about relevant forensic issues. I have no specific, privileged knowledge of the cases I discuss, and my commentary is meant to be informational and educational in nature only.)
Australia has just started to make sense of the deadly stabbings at Bondi Westfield. As I watched this unfold, I was reminded of the Bourke St rampage in 2017. Like most of Melbourne, I was horror-struck. I used to spend time on Bourke Street as I worked at the RMIT campus there and it feels especially troubling when you have been somewhere where an event like this happens and can place yourself in the spatial area. I remember walking past and seeing thousands of flower bouquets and feeling so deeply sad that something like this had happened in my beloved city.
At the time I was still finishing my doctorate in clinical/forensic psychology and was completing a placement at a service which interfaced with Gargasoulas. There was lots of legal wrangling over Gargasoulas in the intervening years, especially about whether he was able to access a not guilty by reason of mental impairment (NGRMI) defence. Essentially, this defence is available to those who commit an offence because of a mental impairment, which means that they may not fully understand how wrong an act is (‘mens rea’, or the guilty mind). As an example, if you are psychotic and believe that your neighbour is the devil and stab him because you want to save humanity, this defence may apply as you did not intend to murder your neighbour and may not have had the capacity to reason that it was morally wrong, or even to know that the person you were killing was your neighbour and not the devil. After many expert reports and days of cross-examination, it was determined that Gargasoulas offended primarily due to drug-induced psychosis (which is essentially seen as self-inflicted, and not grounds for NGRMI) not a primary schizophrenic syndrome present at the time of the offending, and he was thus awarded a life sentence in prison instead of being sent to a forensic hospital.
It’s so important to caveat any discussion of serious mental illness (SMI) and offending by clearly saying that most people with mental illnesses (including psychosis) do not offend, and mental illness alone is rarely an adequate explanation for violence. An excellent explainer on the links between SMI and offending here. In my clinical work, I most often see SMI contributing to violence in conjunction with other factors, such as personality disorder, substance use, and cognitive difficulties.
Based on preliminary reports, it appears that the Bondi Westfield attacker was diagnosed with schizophrenia, though details are unknown. It seems to be a case of lone actor violence with no ideological links to any specific group. Lone actor violence (LAV) is an act of mass violence enacted by a lone person without the backing/involvement of an organised group and sometimes without an ideology driving the violence. It may be terrorist/ideological in nature, or may be driven by grievances, fixations, or other forms of pathology. Lone actor violence is increasingly becoming a problem for governments and law enforcement, and the current thinking is that it’s important to move away from dividing this form of violence up by driver (e.g., terrorism vs grievance fuelled) and to instead work toward a unifying theory of LAV.
Some excellent reading about this here from the Australian Institute of Criminology. A useful reminder from this paper: “Human behaviour is extremely heterogeneous, with multiple potential pathways leading towards violence, and any one antecedent experience having multiple potential outcomes.”
To understand why the attacks happened, we need to work toward understanding the psychology of the person who enacts lone actor violence, and form some type of theory or formulation about the person. I want to say at the outset that deconstructing this now may feel like too much, too soon. Nevertheless, this is what forensic psychologists do. We explore, understand, deconstruct, assess risk, and formulate behaviours — all with the intention of learning as much as we can to prevent future acts of violence.
I’ve seen a number of pieces online dissecting this as gender-based violence and proposing the male entitlement hypothesis. As yet, there is no clear publicly available evidence that gender based attitudes necessarily underlay the act. While more women than men were targetted and killed, this might have been for a range of reasons (e.g., more women than men at the shopping centre at the time, women perhaps being woven into delusions, or being seen as a less threatening mark). A lot of commentary has seized on a remark made by his father indicating that he was frustrated about not having a girlfriend. If this was a clear factor in the attacks then the gender hypothesis needs to be considered, but there’s not always a direct pathway from frustration of this nature to a violent attack, and most people with this same frustration won’t go on to murder six people, suggesting we need to cast the net wider to truly understand this attack. There have been some notable incel attacks where relational frustration/entitlement has been a clear factor and ideology; but we can’t extrapolate from one statement made by the perpetrator’s father alone. I’m also very dubious about the ethics of interviewing his parents, as they were likely shocked, horrified, saddened, and had no media training or prior exposure. They were likely casting about desperately to understand why this happened, just as the rest of us are.
Without knowing the perpetrator’s psychology and motivations, we won’t be able to ascertain whether gender was a distinct motivator, and this is difficult as he is deceased and can’t provide any insight. When events like this occur it can be tempting to make broad statements like ‘this is about male entitlement’. These statements don’t necessarily apply to every such attack and are not at all helpful in terms of violence prevention efforts if gender-based entitlement was not a salient causal factor. Interventions need to be matched to the risk factors, and if we incorrectly identify risk factors and spend money/time on intervening with things that don’t actually significantly influence the likelihood of violence, we will unwittingly contribute to perpetuating ongoing risk. A red herring in risk assessment is dangerous.
The risk assessment literature is still nascent and we are not yet sure why some people engage in violence. This is an unpalatable truth, but it’s important to be clear about the limits of our knowledge. Most research into the characteristics of lone actors show that they have characteristics in common. They are most often men, experience social isolation, have experienced rejection, have instability in living conditions, may have social ties to those who encourage violence (especially in cases of ideologically motivated violence), have histories of childhood disadvantage, and have relatively high rates of mental disorder diagnoses in certain sub-sets of lone actor violence (e.g., school shootings), may have clinical or subclinical personality disorder traits (e.g., grandiosity, lack of empathy, paranoia, odd beliefs), have often experienced interpersonal rejection, and may hold grievances toward certain organisations/people. Lone actors also have specific emotional ways of relating with the world (i.e., with resentment, revenge and anger), and certain cognitive patterns (e.g., inflexibility, frequent violent fantasising). Grievance and fixation are often key facilitators.
Overall, the lone actor group is quite diverse and people may enact violence due to a range of motivations, including a desire for revenge, mental illness which skews perspective and thinking, and for ideological reasons (including gender norms). Despite these differing motivations, many people who engage in LAV share key characteristics and usually evidence a level of social disconnection and disenfranchisement. Deconstruction of each individual case as will occur with a coroner’s inquest is important, and broad-based social (e.g., gun control) and selective/targeted interventions for people/groups identified as being at risk is essential (e.g., mental health care, housing, social supports).
When a trauma happens we often try desperately to find a why, and will tend toward seeking neat explanations (mental illness, gender norms). In reality, most violence is multi-faceted and requires a multiplicity of approaches to remedy.
It’s too early to say if, or how, systems failed and led to the Bondi attack. Instead of settling on neat but possibly spurious explanations designed to give our brains some certainty, it might be more helpful to sit with the sadness, shock, anger and grief, and allow the not-knowing until there is more investigation.
REFERENCES
Brooks, N., & Barry-Walsh, J. (2022). Understanding the role of grievance and fixation in lone actor violence. Frontiers in psychology, 13, 1045694.
De Roy van Zuijdewijn, J., & Bakker, E. (2016). Analysing personal characteristics of lone-actor terrorists: Research findings and recommendations. Perspectives on terrorism, 10(2), 42-49.
Ebbrecht, C. K. (2023). Systematic review: risk factors and mechanisms of radicalization in lone-actor grievance-fueled violence. Nordic psychology, 75(2), 150-184.
https://www.aic.gov.au/sites/default/files/2023-02/ti664_modelling_drivers_of_grievance-fuelled_violence.pdf
WHAT I READ (IN WHOLE OR PART) IN APRIL
The Hummingbird Effect - Kate Mildenhall (loved)
Intimations: Six Essays - Zadie Smith
Woman, Eating - Claire Kohda
Death Valley - Melissa Broder
Pheasants Nest - Louise Milligan (excellent)
The Work - Bri Lee (didn’t love it, didn’t hate it. Preferred Liam Pieper’s pisstake on the art world)
When Things Are Alive They Hum - Hannah Bent (a standout)
Oliver Sacks: The Last Interview: And Other Conversations - Oliver Sacks
Anna O - Matthew Blake (started off promising, so many twists that I got whiplash, and not in a good way)
Prettier If She Smiled More - Toni Jordan
The House With All The Lights On - Jessica Kirkness
Gratitude - Oliver Sacks
The Serpent and the Wings of Night - Carissa Broadbent (meh, dragons > vampires)
Also, I barely watch TV (I’m not morally superior, I just can’t focus on TV), but I did finish an entire TV series — a rarity! Baby Reindeer. You should know all about this show by now (it’s everywhere!), but I also spoke to ABC about some of the themes.
UPCOMING EVENTS
1st May - In Conversation at Bargoonga Nganjin (North Fitzroy library) - keep an eye on their events page. Karla will be in attendance! Bring treats (no chicken, she’s intolerant).
I’ll also be at Sydney Writers Festival 24-26 May, and Brisbane Writers Festival from 31st May - 2nd June - busy month!
Programs are live on the SWF and BWF websites — and especial props to Jackie Ryan’s team at BWF for such a fabulous program. This year I’ll even be contained enough and not such a HOLY-ROLLING-HECK-I-HAVE-TO-SPEAK-ON-PANELS anxiety wreck, and will be able to attend other events.
An especial plug for my workshop on trauma-informed interviewing for writers at BWF - info here.
