The Breivik controversy: politics, terrorism and psychiatry.

OBJECTIVES: To examine and analyse the controversy over psychiatric aspects of the case of Norwegian far right mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik.

CONCLUSIONS: Because of a basic acceptance of methodological individualism and scientific positivism, mainstream psychiatry is currently ill suited to being broadly applied to the spheres of politics and political violence. Rather than jettison psychiatric insights in such cases, the choices facing the profession are either to accept the narrowness of its utility or to work towards a theoretical framework that sees the individual psyche as socially embedded rather than as socially constitutive, and psychiatric science itself as socially constructed and hence inescapably value-laden.