Marie Murray: How to make sense of the Manchester bomb

Too often breaking news brings heartbreaking news. So it was with the most recent suicide bombing on Monday night at the Ariana Grande concert in Manchester.

While terrorist attacks by definition target “non-combatant civilians” the fact that the Manchester venue had a capacity for 21,000 people for a concert specifically attracting children and adolescents increases public distress at the news. There is instinctive emotional empathy for anyone caught up in Monday night’s events; horror at what happened; dismay at the world in which we live; hope in the accounts of the kindness of strangers who brought young people to safety and gratitude for those who contacted frantic parents and housed whole families at the height of the chaos. Terrorism always evokes psychologically complex emotions.

As public spaces become dangerous places then each of us has an emotional response and psychological connection to this tragedy. We have become all too familiar with such news; the initial shock, the emerging story, the evolving narratives about those who died, information about those who were injured; those who were witnesses and those who survived. Soon the catalogue of names the photographs of victims make the abstract event vividly visible as the face of the little eight year old has already done today. We have been down this road now many times with Paris, Nice, Brussels, Berlin, St Petersburg, Westminster Bridge. In the heart of every Irish parent who brought their child to the Ariana Grande concert in Dublin a few weeks ago there is the breathtaking realisation, gratitude and survivor guilt that this could have been me, my child, my life, my world in collapse.

The psychological reverberations for individuals and society are significant because everyone in a society that lives with the threat of terrorism is compromised and there are no European societies that now feel they are immune. If nowhere is safe then everywhere is unsafe. In the locations where terrorist attacks occur entire populations suffer trauma and its sequela – anxiety, hypervigilance, suspicion of strangers, intrusive memories of the media images, phobic reactions, avoidance of large public places that might be targets of terrorism; extra protection of children and bunkering in for family safety.

Varadkar will need a lot of courage and a dollop of good luck

---

FitzPatrick trial undermined by evidential flaws

---

Owen Jones: Manchester is suffering now – but its spirit will overcome this atrocity

---

Manchester faces uncertainty after its darkest night

---

Nor are those at a distance immune because as the images of terrorism are immediately visible to us through media, and because nowhere is safe from the possibility of attack, we too become anxious, hypervigilant, unwilling to travel, avoidant and on the alert.

The number of terrorist attacks has also alerted us to the wide catalogue of victims depending on their proximity or distance from any terrorist event. The “event” victims, the “contact” victims, the “entry” victims such as police, ambulance workers and those in rescue and recovery arriving on the scene. We have become aware of “primary victims” who directly experience terrorism and secondary victims who include the relatives and friends of primary victims. There are third- and fourth-level victims in the surrounding community in which tragedy occurs up to sixth-level victims who, but for chance, might have been there too. And what of those who were beside someone who died who felt the breath of death and escaped?

Psychological understanding of the mentality of terrorists themselves is relatively sparse both because of the complexity of the problem, changing political and social landscapes, the absence of a distinct personality profile and the fact that the suicide bomber is unavailable for interview or psychological analysis. The unpredictability of the perpetrators adds to fear as we fear fear itself.

At home parents already have to lock up their children so much to protect them from “stranger danger”, from “grooming’”from abduction, from cyberbullying, pornography and online abuse. Many had not factored in terrorist attack at entertainment venues at which they accompanied them as risk factors and now they have to. Also what explanations can they give their children who see pictures of children who died at the concert? Well research has always been clear that children take their cue on how to respond to international events from their parents. It has always been advised that conversations begin by finding out what the young person already knows and by listening attentively to that. Age appropriate information, simple facts without unnecessary detail or extreme emotion but showing empathy for those who suffered in a situation that is both sad and tragic and inexplicable is helpful. Finally it is always advised that parents emphasise the fact that the event occurred not here but in another country with the implication that it has not, would not happen here.

And then we all of us hope that what has been visited on so many of our European neighbours does not visit us too.

Dr Marie Murray Clinical Psychologist is Series Editor for the MindYourSelf Cork University Press Health Series Imprint.