TEN OUTSTANDING REFERENCES ABOUT: Psychopathology and terrorism

Knowledge about psychological repercussions in victims of terrorist attacks has aroused the researchers’ interest for decades, but it has been revived after two events which are undoubtedly already historic: September 11 in the U.S.A. , and March 11 in Spain. The volume of papers dealing with victims of terrorism is high, but it increases significantly when the September 11 descriptor is added. Worthy of note is the effort made by American researchers when it came to conducting field studies, though we should also mention that all of them are subsidized to a higher or lesser extent by some kind of organization, whether public or private. In Spain, on the contrary, the scarcity of sound studies on the psychological impact of ETA-related terrorism is quite striking, if we consider that it is a country that has been battered by this kind of events for more than 30 years. Likewise, scientific output as regards the events of March 11 has not been as profuse as compared, for instance, with that produced in the United States on account of September 11, although it is true that it has only been a short time since the occurrence of the Madrid events. On the other hand, a great deal of the material available concerning the psychological consequences of terrorism in our country is more of a disclosing and self-help nature rather than of a scientific nature. However, worthy of note is the significant effort made by the research teams of J. J. Miguel-Tobal, M. Munoz and C. Vazquez, all of them belonging to the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, which enables us to approach the sequels left by such disturbing events as those that occurred on March 11 in the mental health of those who were affected directly and even indirectly. All the aspects heretofore described have made quite complex the task of selecting the most representative 10 papers. For that purpose, we established a number of “requirements”, even being aware that they may not be the most relevant. On the one hand, we have included studies by American and European authors (though the proportion between them is not homogeneous) and we have even considered one of Israeli origin, with the intention of covering almost all terrorist events of major significance worldwide. We also selected studies with diverse objectives and about different types of populations, though we found, in some cases, the collaboration of the same authors in different papers, but giving answers to different hypothesis in each of them. It is worth mentioning that, as foreseeable, most of the research papers chosen consider Posttraumatic Stress Disorder a central psycholopathological manifestation as a basis; however, references can be found that also allude to affective symptoms, coping strategies, amongst others. Lastly, we should point out that what they all have in common is that they are published in journals easily available; in this respect, we underline the fact that there exist other equally attractive papers which are quite consistent with the issue we are concerned with, but access to which is more difficult. The order in which the papers are presented is due to several reasons. In the first place, theoretical