All the Rage

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Anger has been called a sin. It has been called an emotion. Former secretary of state Alexander Haig once called it a “management vehicle.”

One thing anger cannot be called, not yet anyway, is a mental disorder. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, psychiatry’s official guidebook to mental illness, offers multiple varieties of depressions, anxieties, and phobias, but no specific category of disorders for which anger is the defining characteristic. The closest it comes is a mention of intermittent explosive disorder, which is marked by “aggressive impulses that result in serious assaultive acts” in which the aggressiveness “is grossly out of proportion” to the immediate provocation.

Anger experts want more. “We need probably a half-dozen anger disorders,” says Deffenbacher. Such an array, he argues, would help legitimize the study of anger, and help researchers to understand it better and doctors to improve their interventions.

Not everyone agrees. Some people argue that making anger a disorder would give domestic abusers a get-out-of-jail-free card, allowing them to plead that they were at the mercy of an illness when they lashed out. Others simply object to the idea of labeling more and more behaviors as disorders, which they say only feeds the therapeutic and pharmaceutical industries.

Deffenbacher and other specialists in anger, however, say that recognizing dysfunctional anger as a disorder would help more troubled people recognize their problems and seek help. That argument should not be dismissed too easily. For most angry people, the real problem is not their anger. The problem is the endless series of people and things that keep provoking their anger. “Want me to stop being angry?” the angry guy asks. “Then tell the world to leave me alone.”

Even the most patient of us can put together a long list of things that piss us off in the course of a day. What does it for you? People who fail to say “excuse me” when they run over your foot with their baby stroller? Drivers who drift across your lane when they make a left-hand turn in front of you? Bellicose vice presidents of the United States? Litterers who toss cigarette butts and Big Gulp cups out of car windows? Movie theater talkers? Cell phone loudmouths? E-mail nonresponders? Wiseass journalists?

What if they could all be convinced to disappear? What if all the things that pushed your buttons just went away? You’re a decent person. At the core, your nature is good. Remember how you stayed late to clean up after the book group meeting last week, even though it wasn’t your turn? If you could just avoid the jerks, the rude bastards, how much calmer would you be?

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