A Belfast-based clinical psychologist is to address a major conference in Dublin tomorrow with an analysis of how the Troubles have affected the state of mind of people in the North.
Dr Raman Kapur, director of the mental health charity, Threshold, in Belfast and honorary senior lecturer at Queen's University, is due to present his ideas to the ninth Congress of the European Association of Psychotherapy at UCD this weekend.
His paper, The Troubled Mind of Northern Ireland, was co-written by Dr Jim Campbell, senior lecturer in social work at Queen's. Their observations are partly based on direct clinical experience with patients who displayed a "hard man mentality".
Dr Kapur's analysis is that human relationships among people in more polarised social settings in Northern Ireland are characterised by paranoia and suspicion.
"The language of the patient's paranoid anxieties would be driven by the culture and discourse of life in a violent society," he said. One of the patients quoted in the paper, a 40-year-old man, was concerned his therapist would "plant a bomb" in his mind without a prior "telephone warning" and stressed the importance of "attacking before being attacked".
A 39-year-old woman patient used violent military images of how she would "machine gun" the therapist or "blow his brains out" if she felt threatened by him. "For the therapist, it reflected what she experienced in a wider society, a deeper fear of trusting others for fear of being invaded, terrorised and attacked," writes Dr Kapur.
The paper also draws on Dr Kapur's experiences working with the trauma and recovery team in the aftermath of the Omagh bomb. "There was a huge level of distrust and a loss of basic faith in humanity there. That is the acute reaction to extreme circumstances but there are residual effects also," he said.