The Mental Health Foundation hopes its new report will further our understanding of the causes and consequences of anger. Photograph: Corbis
No one really thinks of anger as a mental illness. Quite right too. Everyone gets angry at times, and while there are all sorts of reasons why an angry person can be irritating, threatening, bullying, obnoxious, even violent, it doesn't make them a bad person necessarily, or, especially, a mad person.
So the Mental Health Foundation report published today, Boiling Point will put many people immediately on their guard. Are we about to medicalise another aspect of human emotion? Can a wonder drug be far behind? Happily, creating a new "disorder" is not what the report is about, but about understanding what the causes and consequences of anger are.
As Mary O'Hara, writing in Society Guardian today points out, most of us believe we are getting angrier and short-tempered. Think of road rage, or footballers berating referees, or the fury triggered by, say, queue-jumping and other mindless infractions of commonly accepted social rules.
These may sound like relatively trivial consequences of our aggressively individualistic outlook, our excessive sense of entitlement, the weight of work and social pressures on us to perform and conform, and our feelings of impotence at apparent injustice.
But isolated anger jags can become what the report calls "problem anger", which can trigger or exacerbate depression, and lead to violence, and family breakdown. We wrote about this kind of anger earlier this year in Society Guardian, in an interview with Neil Watson of the Violence Initiative a charity which provides support and therapy for excessively angry people.
"His clients," we wrote, " are the stuff of many people's nightmares. Wife beaters, pub brawlers, the ones who scream at strangers on the street, grab their girlfriends by the hair in public, and smack their children in supermarkets while shoppers avert their eyes."
Problem angry people, says Watson, are not just the stuff of fist-throwing, heavy drinking, thuggish stereotype: his clients include millionaires and professionals; a third are women. He adds:
The common denominator in all our clients is a complete historical neglect of their emotional wellbeing. When most of them get angry, they have no idea what the trigger is. They blame it on other people winding them up, because they don't know how to define any emotion. Violence is the only conclusion they know, so this is what we're trying to unpick.
This is not, says Watson, "anger management", but something much more deep-seated, in need of something a bit more strongly therapeutic. It sounds to me as much about internal emotional mis-wiring as it does about buckling under external societal pressures. But how would we diagnose this? And what treatments can we (or should we) offer?
The Mental Health Foundation report is discussed by O'Hara, along with the foundation's chief executive, Andrew McCulloch, and psychiatrist Paul Keedwell on Society Guardian's mental health podcast launched today. We also talk to our columnist Clare Allan
about Channel 4's upcoming dramatisation of her novel Poppy Shakespeare and to poet Bose Dania, on her experiences of depression. The podcast is produced by those wonderful people at sounddelivery.
It's our first full scale audio production. Let us know what you think.
