Suicide Bombers Are Brainwashed, Disturbed

In “Method Without Madness” (July 30), your Column One about suicide bombers, you quote a number of mental health professionals, including one who claims that the suicide bombers are “psychologically as normal as you and I.” You offer no differing view.

As a clinical psychologist for 25 years, I view this claim as nothing short of absurd. Suicide cultists are clearly operating from a mass delusion and are very disturbed. Children dying to be close to God are brainwashed and out of their minds. The fact that forethought goes into these acts does not prove they aren’t coming from a very disturbed inner mental process. You don’t need to look like a raving lunatic to think like one.

Why aren’t older men who have lived full lives wanting to sacrifice for their righteous cause? If martyrdom is next to godliness, why is it mostly the young who are lining up to strap on the bomb-laden belts? Any belief that makes us take our own life--short of extenuating circumstances such as extreme pain or torture--I consider pathological, no matter what forethought has gone into it and no matter how lofty the politico-religious cause may be.

We are now subject to what happens when institutionalized craziness goes out to fight a war. And it isn’t pretty. Because craziness never is. Throughout history, craziness combined with ideological righteousness has always been a lethal combination. Always. Do you think it’s going to be any different this time?

Steven Hendlin PhD

Corona del Mar

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When perusing the chart, “Suicide Through the Ages,” that accompanied your article, I felt like a kid playing one of those “which item does not belong in this category” word games. My answer is, of course, the item describing the Jewish men and women who committed suicide at Masada rather than being raped, beaten, tortured and then executed by the Romans.

The remaining items on the chart described individuals, such as the Japanese kamikaze pilots, committing suicide while maiming and killing as many of the enemy as possible. I do not believe that such actions can be compared to those of a group willing to die rather than be captured and killed. The men and women at Masada did not attempt to harm their would-be captors during their death throes, unlike today’s suicide bombers in the Middle East.

Daniel Yankelevits

Los Angeles