Thursday, July 5, 2012

Intermittent Explosive Disorder (IED): A New Term You Need to Know.?

by John and Diane.


I was reading this article from ScienceDaily.com about how uncontrollable anger seems to be more and more prevalent amongst teens these days and thought to myself.. tell me something I dont already know...

I bet alot of you foster and adoptive parents feel the same way.

A lot of children coming through the foster care system have good reason to be angry of course, with histories of abuse, neglect, and God knows what else... anger is a symptom of feeling helpless and frustrated.

I guess it took researchers from Harvard to give it a name.  "Intermittent Explosive Disorder."

I mention this new term here, because, undoubtedly, it is going to be thrown around now in the foster care and health care circles and just as "Reactive Attachment Disorder" can be called "Attachment disorder," "Trust disorder" and numerous other things... This new term may be used to identify children who have... well, basically anger issues.

There are very specific diagnostic criteria for IED, including age and occurance, but, when it comes to classifying a child for care, this new term may actually help you get the help and assistance you may need for your child from a system that likes to cut back and cut corners.

Check out the article below and as with all potential new diagnostic information, consider it just another tool to put into your foster/adoptive parent knowledge toolbelt.

Uncontrollable Anger Prevalent Among U.S. Youth: Almost Two-Thirds Have History of Anger Attacks

ScienceDaily (July 2, 2012) — Nearly two-thirds of U.S. adolescents have experienced an anger attack that involved threatening violence, destroying property or engaging in violence toward others at some point in their lives. These severe attacks of uncontrollable anger are much more common among adolescents than previously recognized, a new study led by researchers from Harvard Medical School finds.

The study, based on the National Comorbidity Survey Replication Adolescent Supplement, a national face-to-face household survey of 10,148 U.S. adolescents, found that nearly two-thirds of adolescents in the U.S. have a history of anger attacks. It also found that one in 12 young people -- close to six million adolescents -- meet criteria for a diagnosis of Intermittent Explosive Disorder (IED), a syndrome characterized by persistent uncontrollable anger attacks not accounted for by other mental disorders.
 The results were published July 2 in Archives of General Psychiatry.
IED has an average onset in late childhood and tends to be quite persistent through the middle years of life. It is associated with the later onset of numerous other problems, including depression and substance abuse, according to senior author Ronald Kessler, McNeil Family Professor of Health Care Policy at HMS and leader of the team that carried out the study. Yet only 6.5 percent of adolescents with IED received professional treatment for their anger attacks.

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4 comments:

  1. Dear John and Diane,

    thanks for inviting me to your blog. You were right, it has got some texts very interesting from my occupation point of view. Today for eg, I learned what IED is :)

    Looking forward to your new posts,
    Aleksandra

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  2. Thanks for stopping by! Glad you found something useful!
    John and Diane

    ReplyDelete
  3. maybe just maybe you are looking at it from a foster point of veiw but i am a mother of a child in foster care who just turned 5 he was taken from me when he was almost four they have told me he has this disorder and i think he is just a scared little boy who is acting out because our bond was taken from him at an early age maybe not foster kids are being abused and neglected. maybe they were wrongfully taken from the home just because it was dirty like my kids were i am tryin to get my kids back. but you dont always have to belive what the workers are telling you about the real parents. i love my children and being away from them is not all fun in games. you foster parents dont here the whole story and just assume the worst. assume only makes an ass out of you

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    1. Thanks for your comments. We appreciate your reading.

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