Spirituality and interconnectedness can be an antidote to terrorism and trauma.

Surviving a terrorist attack changes a person. I know; I survived two. It would have been easy for me to recoil in, trapped by trauma. Others lash outward in retaliation. As a psychiatrist, I became passionate about understanding the origins of terrorism—examining how a world could create the kinds of destructiveI was open to every avenue of healing. It was at the intersection of understanding and surrender where I found transformation.

The possibility of incorporating spirituality as one path to healing from trauma is the case of an undiagnosed, untreated schizophrenic adolescent domestic mass shooter. Consider"A.M.," one adolescent from our study. Tragically, only after being incarcerated and properly medicated was this adolescent able to not only have his chronic auditory hallucinations stop, but eventually to also experience a spiritual transformation.

At the age of 15, he first shot and killed both his parents. The next day he engaged in a high-school shooting that left two students dead and 25 others wounded. Similar to the history of many of the adolescent shooters we reviewed, A.M. had highStarting at the age of 12, he suffered from auditory hallucinations of male voices. One voice would put him down and deride him, and the second told him to kill.

A.M. looked “normal” and hid his psychotic symptoms from judges, attorneys, and doctors because this tormented adolescent was terrified to be labeled mentally ill. Prior to the shootings, his parents also hid their own extensive mental health illness, on both sides of their family, from their son’s treating psychologist. His parents stopped A.M.’sa few months before the shooting. Despite his auditory hallucinations, they claimed that he was doing “well” and no longer needed psychological care.

2. Cerfolio, NE, Glick ID, Kamis D, Laurence M. . A retrospective observational study of psychosocial determinants and psychiatric diagnoses of mass shooters in the United States. Psychodynamic Psychiatry. 2022; 50 : 513-528.is an assistant clinical professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and the author of Psychoanalytic and Spiritual Perspectives on Terrorism: Desire for Destruction.

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