Anger Management Therapy to Prevent Murder and Suicide
We may really be taking the concept of anger management too lightly—as merely a subject for movies or, at worst, a class that aggressive drivers are required to attend. But anger can have a really dark side, and data that have just been released by the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention illustrate the consequences of anger, when it is not addressed. The main finding of this first systematic, in-depth study of murder and suicide in our society is that people’s personal conflicts make up the chief factor leading to these deaths. It’s not all about random acts of violence. What the CDC found was that interpersonal and relationship problems, especially between intimate partners or family members—usually complicated by mental heath conditions and or substance use problems—were behind many of the deaths. And the bad news is that these findings seem to reflect trends in our society.
Anger Management Skills as Violence Prevention
The study suggests that perhaps we should be putting a lot more effort into providing people the knowledge and skills to handle the personal conflicts in their lives, so that anger doesn’t continue to build and then finally explode into violence with horrific results.