Mental disorder and discernment in jihadi terrorists: A study of 100 pre-sentence forensic psychiatric evaluations in...

France, one of the principal countries from which fighters leave for Syria, is the primary European target of Islamist terrorists. The majority of the data of the literature indicate that psychiatric disorders are not overrepresented in perpetrators of terrorist acts. Nevertheless, these data do not examine expert opinions regarding the discernment of jihadi terrorists at the time of the offense. We aimed to examine abolition and impairment of discernment in psychiatric expert reports on convicted jihadi terrorists in France, and to study any psychiatric disorders identified by the experts as related to the offenses. Our secondary objective was to describe the sociodemographic, psychopathological and criminological characteristics of convicted jihadi terrorists, the type of offense and the mode of radicalization. In collaboration with the national counter-terrorism prosecutor's office (Parquet National Antiterroriste, PNAT), we carried out a retrospective descriptive study of the data collected in the pre-sentence penal psychiatric reports of individuals definitively convicted of a terrorist offense from 2017 onwards. We studied 100 pre-sentence penal psychiatric expert reports and their corresponding case files. No reports concluded on abolition of discernment at the time of the offenses, and a minority concluded on impairment. The experts observed personality disorders, but little mental illness. Social media had played a major part in the radicalization of our population, which was essentially male and young at the time of the offenses. We may conclude that in jihadi terrorism, the issue is less the presence or absence of mental illness than the psychological mechanisms involved in radicalization and acting out. Preventive actions could be developed through understanding of these mechanisms.