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Mental health, illness and communal violence in Northern Ireland
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 January 2018
Abstract
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Many psychologically informed books and papers have been published during the past 30 years that have explored different elements of the Northern Ireland problem. These have ranged from Padraig O'Malley's (1990) fascinating examination of the world of the hunger strikers and their families, to a recent socio-psychological study of sectarianism in young children, which was sponsored by the Community Relations Council (Connolly et al, 2002). The latter careful piece of work demonstrated that while children of three years of age are beginning to identify different cultural symbols, there is not much evidence of sectarian attitudes until about five or six years of age. By this time they have not only begun to recognise and identify with partisan symbols, but also to express deeply antagonistic sectarian attitudes. These are not wholly unexpected findings, but the purpose of good research is to enquire whether things are in fact the way one might expect them to be. When it comes to research on clinical psychiatry there is less material but the most interesting and unexpected finding that emerges from the published work of psychiatrists in Northern Ireland is the limited evidence of any increased violence-related psychiatric illness in the population as a whole.
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- Thematic Paper – Terrorism
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This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits noncommercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.- Copyright
- Copyright © The Royal College of Psychiatrists 2003
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