Fatima Akilu has plenty of experience in dealing with lost and troubled souls. As a youth worker in London, she counselled homeless young people, and while working at a psychiatric hospital in Washington, her patients included John Hinckley Jr, the man who shot President Ronald Reagan in 1981.
Today, though, from her new desk at the offices of Nigeria's National Security Advisor, the former NHS psychologist is studying the psyche of a man with a far darker personality, whose boasts of killing people "like chickens and sheep" rival those of the fictional Hannibal Lecter.
Her latest "client" - not that he is likely to drop by for therapy - is Abubakar Shekau, the leader of Boko Haram, the Islamist group responsible for a rampage of murder, rape, pillage and kidnapping across northern Nigeria in the last five years.
Notorious for his abduction of more than 200 schoolgirls last year, Shekau and his footsoldiers have been forced onto the backfoot recently by Nigerian army strikes into Boko Haram's north-eastern strongholds.
But while the country's new president, Mohammadu Buhari, vowed to intensify the military campaign when he was sworn-in last weekend, Nigerian officials fear that unless more is done to stop young Nigerians becoming radicalised in the first place, the group will resurge once more. Hence Dr Akilu's appointment last year to run the country’s first counter-extremism programme, which aims to find out why such vicious men as Shekau have any appeal in the first place.
"When we started the program, we didn't really have any experience of anything other than military solutions," said Dr Akilu, who has a psychology PHD from the University of Reading. "The challenge is to look into what Boko Haram's message is, and how we can get a different one across."
Such strategies may now be commonplace in the likes of Britain, but not in Nigeria, for whom the last five years of Boko Haram's mayhem has been a rude awakening to the horrors of international terrorism.
Until now, the government’s response has been overwhelmingly "stick" rather than "carrot", with the security forces’ often brutal reprisals acting as one of the sect's best recruiting sergeants.
Last year, however, the country's national security advisor, Mohammad Sambo Dasuki, announced a new "soft approach" of education and rehabilitation - part of it at school pupils, and part of it aimed at the thousands of young men now languishing as Boko Haram suspects in Nigeria's jails.
It was also relatively new turf for Ms Akilu, who attended the Beechwood Sacred Heart boarding school in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, and who also writes children’s books with an educational theme. Mr Dasuki recruited her after reading a series of articles that she had written for newspapers in Nigeria, where she has campaigned for Nigerian children to be able to read at least 100 books a year.
It is precisely such educational drives that put her at odds with Boko Haram, whose name translates roughly as "Western education is forbidden", and whose gunmen have destroyed hundreds of schools across north-east Nigeria. Yet as Ms Akilu points out, nearly nine million children in Nigeria go with very little or no schooling every year anyway.
That makes them easily vulnerable to Boko Haram's bizarre world view, which claims for example that the world is flat, and that rain does not come from the process of evaporation, but from the grace of God.
"We find a lot of the young guys who are in prison on suspicion of Boko Haram activity have stunted abilities to think logically," said Ms Akilu, who visits inmates regularly.
"If you are a true Muslim and have some interpretation of Islam you can debunk this stuff, but if not, then you may be susceptible to it."
A lack of education, though, is not the only source of radicalisation. While Britain frets over about young Muslims feeling marginalised in Bradford or Birmingham, it is nothing compared to the lack of opportunity experienced by their counterparts in Boko Haram's heartlands in north-east Nigeria. The area is poor even by local standards, while messages about politicians being corrupt and venal are more than just rhetoric.
It was among the young and unemployed that Boko Haram's original leader, Mohammed Yusuf, found a ready audience when he first started the group in 2002. A preacher who preferred a non-violent approach, he combined hardline religious views with a powerful televisual charisma.
"Yusuf was extremely persuasive and very knowledgeable, especially to youngsters who are only 18-19, and still searching for what their own life is all about," said Ms Akilu. "But his cause was always about power and control, and he used Islam for that."
The Nigerian army arrested Yusuf in 2009 after a battle with his followers in his stronghold city of Maiduguri that led to the deaths of hundreds of people. They are widely believed to have shot him dead in his police cell, an act of calculated brutality that simply served to replenish Boko Haram's ranks.
It also paved the way for the movement to be taken over by his one-time deputy Shekau, who has taken it in a much more violent direction, recently declaring allegiance with the Islamic State.
In contrast to Yusuf, Shekau comes across more as a psychopath than a militant, ranting in video broadcasts in a manner that makes the late Osama bin Laden look measured. “I enjoy killing anyone that God commands me to kill," he says in one video, "the same way that I enjoy killing chickens and rams.” In another, he threatens Margaret Thatcher and the late Pope John Paul II, apparently unaware that both were already dead.
Such is his ruthlessness that Ms Akilu believes he has actually put people off joining the organisation, hence its tactic in the last few years of kidnapping and brainwashing recruits in the same fashion as Uganda's cult-like Lord's Resistance Army.
"Shekau certainly comes across as extremely unstable," she added. "If you were to assess him, that would probably be part of the diagnosis, although may just be that he is now under extreme pressure."
As part of their research into what makes Shekau tick and his followers tick, Ms Akilu's department have also commissioned a documentary film charting Boko Haram's rise over the past decade, which is being screened at a cinema in the Nigerian capital, Abuja.
Virtually nothing is known about Shekau's year prior to joining the group, although the researchers did manage to track down former classmates in a rural village on the Nigeria/Niger border. Viewers of the film will perhaps not be surprised to learn what they found out. "His childhood friends say he was very unstable, erratic figure," said Ms Akilu.
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