Call for participants: RAN Mental Health “The changing frameworks of (extremist) ideologies – implications for mental health practitioners”

We are currently looking for suitable participants for the RAN Mental Health Working Group meeting on “The changing frameworks of (extremist) ideologies – implications for mental health practitioners”.

Background

In recent years extremist groups have become more fragmented, both socially and ideologically, meaning there is a decrease in or lack of charismatic leadership, hierarchy or a strong structure. As a results, ideologies and believe systems have become highly individualized and no longer adhere to a shared group ideology. Extremists are picking and choosing their own ideologies, sometimes even picking beliefs that seem to contradict one another. Due to the emergence of the online world, and the pandemic serving as a catalyst, recent observations show that vulnerable individuals have started creating more personal frameworks of actions that in some cases are harder to predict, prevent and/or analyse.

With many P/CVE approaches having a ideology orientated approach, the emergence of fragmented ideologies and so-called ‘pick-and-choose or salad bar ideologies’ will undoubtedly have implications for these approaches, while new challenges have been mentioned in earlier RAN meetings (e.g. not wanting to wear a facemask during therapy, increased paranoia etc.) What the exact challenges and implications are needs to be made clear.

Mental health professionals are perfectly equipped to address this development from a psychological standpoint and to provide answers regarding the need for adaptations in existing approaches, or whether this means going back to basics by looking at the underlying mechanics that drive people towards extremism and personal frameworks of action.  

This meeting aims to explore these developments, its implications and challenges for mental health practitioners from different professional backgrounds (police, prison, social work, rehabilitation and reintegration) working in the field of P/CVE. The following questions will be explored during the meeting:

• What societal developments (covid, social media, (geo)political) are key in understanding the shift from group to personal frameworks of action? Can we point out some root causes?
• What are the underlying dynamics of the need for individual frameworks and how do they fit into societal developments?
• How does this impact extremist actions, its predictability and the monitoring of these individuals?
• What are the consequences for existing assessments, approaches (including cross sectoral multi-agency approaches) and therapy/treatment? Does this harm the efficiency of preventing radicalisation leading to violent extremism? 

Call for participants

We are currently looking for mental health practitioners experienced in working with radicalised individuals. Since the impact of this changing landscape of (extremist) ideologies might expand further than the mental health sector, with possibly more direct effects on police work, EXIT work and local authorities, practitioners from these fields can also apply to join the meeting.

In order to find the best suited participants and to tailor the meeting content to the practitioners’ needs, we would like you to fill out this survey before 05 September.

We will invite participants based on this information. Please keep in mind that we only have a limited amount of places available for this meeting to foster exchanges, so participation is not guaranteed. We will contact you on this by the end of August.
If you know other suitable participants for whom this meeting is interesting, we encourage you to forward the call.

Do you have any further questions? Please do not hesitate to contact j [dot] krasenbergradaradvies [dot] nl (Jordy Krasenberg) and f [dot] denizradaradvies [dot] nl (Feline Deniz).