Wednesday, June 07, 2006
Anger as a mental illness? That's crazy
Luanne Traud
Recent columns
- Marking a difficult anniversary
- My daughter, the voter
- A few new Voices would be nice
- A rush to legislate
From the RoundTable blog
During the recent Memorial Day weekend, the girls and I traveled to Pennsylvania for a family function. Before we hit the Pennsylvania Turnpike for the return trip, the girls asked if I'd stop by an Eat 'N' Park restaurant to pick up a dozen Smiley face cookies. (It's a favorite that we have yet to duplicate here.)
The restaurant was packed. I circled the parking lot twice before finding a spot, then entered a crowded lobby where families waited for tables while others stood in line to pay the bill. I took my spot at the end and waited as the line slowly inched forward. I was next when a second cashier opened up and said, "Who's next?" As I stepped forward, a man jumped out of nowhere and handed her his slip. I sighed -- loudly, I'm sure -- and the woman behind me yelled, "Just who does he think he is? Someone special?"
Before long, the line of people vented a lifetime of pent-up frustration. The flustered cashier returned the man's check and said, "Please, sir. Get in line."
That should have been enough to restore order. It wasn't. The anger hung heavy as I exited the lobby.
This wasn't the first time I noticed the contagious nature of anger. It's most noticeable on the road when a driver cuts off another, flaming his rage so that he uses his vehicle as a weapon, menacing others, who in turn become angry and so on.
So it really comes as little surprise that a study funded by the National Institute of Mental Health found that Americans are increasingly angry. Younger ones more so than older ones. Some 16 million of us are ticked off easily.
The researchers have a name to describe uncontrollable anger that involves aggressive, threatening behavior: intermittent explosive disorder.
Laymen call it bad manners, temper tantrums, immaturity, acting as if the world revolves around you and that all should drop everything and cater to your immediate wants. This "disorder's" onset usually turns up around the age of 2, with an expected relapse in early teens before the aggrieved finally realizes that, surprise, other people also inhabit this planet and deserve a little respect.
Bouts of uncontrollable, destructive anger certainly indicate poor mental health, but it will take more than a "disorder" label to convince me that it is an actual illness. Yet, before long, pharmaceutical companies will spring to market with a pill to take the edge off IED. And Americans who never matured beyond adolescent angst will swallow manufactured remedies for failure to control bad behavior and mutter it wasn't their fault they beat their wife, kicked the dog, punched a hole in the wall.
Allowing the overdiagnosis of poor impulse control as mental illnesses detracts from the very real, very serious and very dangerous mental illnesses that are indeed caused by very terrible things that happen within sufferers' brains. Unlike schizophrenia that can't be willed away, anger management is a learned skill.
The study involved interviews conducted between 2001 to 2003 by Harvard and University of Chicago researchers of 9,282 people 18 years and older. The findings that most startled the study's authors: IED is on the increase among teenagers, and it may make them more susceptible to depression and alcoholism. Further, there seemed to be a strong connection between people with IED and alcohol and drug abuse. Cause or effect?
Of greater worry are the thousands of children now reaching adulthood who caught the first wave of overly prescribed psychiatric medication. In the Archives of General Psychiatry that published the IED research, another study, also funded in part by the National Institute of Mental Health, found that potent antipsychotic drugs to treat children and adolescents for aggression and mood swings increased five-fold in a decade. In a two-year period from 1993 to 1995 (when Attention Deficit Disorder was first gaining notoriety) 275 children out of 100,000 were on Ritalin or antidepressants. By 2002, psychiatric drugs were prescribed for 1,438 children out of 100,000.
Granted, some of children have mental illnesses that fail to respond to treatment other than medication. And perhaps increased awareness allows psychiatrists to recognize and treat illnesses such as bipolar disorder at younger ages.
But how many children are unnecessarily on a course to bounce from one disorder to the next for want of guidance at an early age to learn how to control their behavior without chemical enhancement? That concern is enough to make a sane person angry.
