What Is Intermittent Explosive Disorder?

Intermittent explosive disorder is when anger appears to come out of nowhere, followed by an outburst of emotion. In this video, psychologist Jennifer Hartstein, PsyD, explains how road rage is a good example of this explosive, angry behavior.

Transcript

00:00

So intermittent explosive disorder

00:07

is a psychiatric diagnosable disorder for people who have kind of anger out of nowhere, where most of the time they're pretty calm

00:13

and they have good control over their emotions, and then seemingly innocuous things will really put them over the edge.

00:19

And they really do explode. And then, magically, they kind of come back and they calm down once that explosion is done.

00:25

So we know that about 5% to 7% of the population suffers with this. And it is treatable if we give people some coping strategies to manage their anger more effectively.

00:33

For example, road rage is one way that we often see intermittent explosive disorder in people.