About
Tahir Rahman, M.D. is an award-winning author and physician-scientist at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. He led the development of utilizing three cognitive affective drivers in threat assessment (Obsessions, Delusions and Extreme Overvalued Beliefs). His latest work has been collaboration with Dr. Reid Meloy on "Archetype Killers." Dr. Rahman is a passionate educator of students, psychiatrists and a lecturer at the Association of Threat Assessment Professionals and the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law. He has authored or co-authored numerous articles in peer-reviewed psychiatric and threat assessment journals as well as textbook chapters. Dr. Rahman has consulted on criminal and civil cases for the past 25 years, and has now directed his work towards development of new public health violence prevention tools.
Dr. Rahman was born in Saskatchewan, Canada and he grew up in Kansas. His parents were from Pakistan and his father was a British trained psychiatrist. Dr. Rahman attended Haysville Campus High School and then attended the University of Kansas for both undergraduate and medical school degrees. He next completed his residency training in psychiatry at The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. He has won several teaching awards and research awards. He is an avid aviation and space enthusiast, historian, lecturer, father, memorabilia collector and dog owner. One of his overarching missions is to end school mass shootings.
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Development
While the definitions of delusion and obsession are familiar to most psychiatrists, overvalued ideas are less known, but are a key aspect of phenomenology in understanding eating disorders, some suicides, vexatious litigants, terrorists, and mass shooters. Abnormal fixations are experienced as normal by the individual because their reasoning is rational within their belief system (often a depraved subculture). Fixations such as these typically begin as a grandiose fantasy which then progresses to a lethal ideology analogous to the way eating disorders begin as a fantasy of becoming more thin and attractive, yet progresses to emaciation and even death. A school shooter or assassin might fantasize about becoming attractive to others through instant fame and notoriety. This fame is contagious due to a well known "copy cat" phenomenon fueled through media posts in digital subcultures.
Overvalued ideas have been described in the psychiatric literature for well over 125 years. An extreme overvalued belief is a fixation that is shared by others in a person’s cultural, religious, or subcultural group. The belief is often relished, amplified, and defended by the possessor of the belief and should be differentiated from an obsession or a delusion. The belief grows more dominant over time, more refined and more resistant to challenge. The individual has an intense emotional commitment to the belief and may carry out violent behavior in its service.
