From Mehmood Naqshbandi
Kamaldeep Bhui’s valuable article identifies depression as one of the very few common factors among those expressing extremist sympathies (11 April, p 24).
He is completely correct to debunk the conventional wisdom that religious zeal, social deprivation or political grievances are motives. A UK Security Service report demonstrated no ability to profile terrorists along these lines, showing that such simplistic notions are confined to populist politicians and the populist press.
A difficulty is that since depression affects a high proportion of the population, whereas violent extremists are, by their actions, outliers from the normal distribution of the population, depression offers little to guide counter-extremist activity. It does mesh well with my own work, published on the Countering Extremism pages of .
Wimbledon, Surrey, UK
