Teens Suffer with Anger Disorders and It Needs Intervention

Escalating violence among teens is due to a variety of reason rather than just one.  Harvard Medical School researchers have found that 1 in 12 teens suffer from what's being called "Intermittent explosive disorder (IED)."

Most of the teens often have difficulty dealing with their negative emotions. They are most often characterized as over emotional or prone to outburst. Like any adult teenagers they experience stress every day but they have poor coping skills and getting angry is the only way out to let go of that stress.

The researchers held interviews with over 10,000 individuals, including 6,483 adolescents and their parents. It was observed that nearly 8 percent of them met the criteria for intermittent explosive disorder.

This new study was published in the Journal Achieves of General Psychiatry. The uncontrollable anger that the researchers observed are property damage, threats of violence and engaging in violence.

IED is the repeated episodes of violent behaviour in which the person reacts in a very ghastly manner to the situation. Certain behaviour that shows the signs of IED is road rage, angry outburst or temper tantrums, domestic abuse or breaking objects. People with IED may attack others and their possessions

The study says, "The attacks must involve failure to control aggressive impulses and not be accounted for by another mental disorder or physiological effects of a substance. Intermittent explosive disorder is the only DSM-IV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition) disorder for which the core feature is impulsive aggression."

In order to diagnose IED in an individual the researchers say that their behaviour cannot be accounted for by another mental disorder.  The study found that, two third of the adolescents showed lifetime anger attacks like destroying property, threatening violence. Eight of the ten met the criteria while others walked out with few symptoms.

Ronald Kessler, a psychiatric epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School in Boston and lead author of the study said, "It's an enormous problem that mental health professionals have not taken seriously.  I think it's clear from this study that needs to change. There are lots of things people don't get treatment for because it doesn't really impact them. This does. The problem is that an awful lot of people have it, more than I thought, it's awfully chronic, and it's impairing."

Christopher Lane, author of 'Shyness: How Normal Behaviour Became a Sickness', worries that even for those who meet the criteria for an IED diagnosis, "it's still a big, unsettled question whether their periodic anger and threatened or actual violence should be considered a lifelong mental disorder rather than a psychological crisis involving major life-stressors such as job loss, poverty, home foreclosure, debt issues and drug and alcohol addiction."