Syria: UK Military Action

Baroness Hollins Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd December 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hollins (CB)]

My Lords, little has been said about the psychological roots and psychological impact of war and terrorism, and I am grateful to senior colleagues at the Royal College of Psychiatrists and the British Psychological Society for their advice. How and why do young people choose to fight with a terrorist organisation? They started life needing the same things that we need: to be safe, to be loved, to have a future. What went wrong? Misguided idealism is an inadequate answer. Each started as an ordinary child whose life pathway took them to a place where they started doing extraordinarily evil things.

All children in growing up take time and need parental support to achieve the intellectual and emotional maturity that will allow them to modulate their behaviour and manage powerful feelings such as anger, impotence and despair. Children traumatised by violence or abuse are more likely to go on to inflict trauma on those weaker than themselves. The bully looks for the Achilles heel of his enemy before striking. Trauma is trans- generational, but its expression may vary from generation to generation and our primary task must be to try to break the cycle of trauma. Education and care are critical. Our schools pay insufficient attention to the emotional needs of their students; child and adolescent mental health services have been cut to the bone; and youth services have an inadequate reach. This is not good enough. We must invest in the mental health of future generations, not just in mental health services but in creating mentally healthy communities.

You might ask what I know of war. My father died of his war wounds 50 years after he was seriously injured on the day after D-day while leading a battalion inland from the Normandy beaches. He suffered post-traumatic stress disorder for the rest of his life, but it was not diagnosed or treated. The ripples of war last for a long time. Many veterans of more recent wars still live with the psychological consequences of their military experience with shockingly little support for their mental wounds. It seems that we have still not provided the infrastructure needed to help our own veterans resume a normal life. Some civilian survivors of the London Blitz had nightmares for 50 years because they did not know they could get help. Even now, only one in seven people in this country seeking psychological therapy will get it. The Prime Minister says that the infrastructure needed to help Syria recover after the war is over will be provided, but has he factored in the psychiatric and psychological treatment and rehabilitation services that will be essential for peace to be secured?

As a psychiatrist myself, I know, and as most psychologists know, here in the west we are seeing a knee-jerk and “groupthink” reaction. Our horror at events in Paris and Tunisia has turned into a rush to violent retribution. It is inevitable that many people will lose friends and family members and be seriously traumatised as a result of British bombs, some of them going on to suffer post-traumatic stress disorder, complicated bereavement, depression and anxiety. They will stay awake at night, unable to forget the awful things that they have seen. What about children bereaved of parents or siblings, who will not have parents to teach them about forgiveness and about normal human relationships of love and trust? Some of the people whose families and friends we have bombed will join the original aggressors and the cycle will go on.

Syrian refugees settled in the UK are likely to have ambivalent feelings, including concern for relatives left behind. They will be directly aware of what is happening back home through social media. How much investment is being made in the communities from which British-born IS volunteers are recruited? By enriching their families’ lives and investing in the stable future of those societies, we would be investing in the whole world’s security.

Restoring peace, security and the rule of law, and freedom from arbitrary murder, persecution, rape and terror, would be one of the best mental health interventions there is, but does the Minister agree that attending to psychological trauma experienced by survivors will also be essential to break the cycle of violence?