Outlook Southwest, the psychology services commissioned by Cornwall Healthcare Trust, has recently announced that it will no longer be commissioned to deliver their ‘Understanding Anger’ course or to accept referrals for one-to-one counselling where the client’s main presenting issue is anger.
This is hard to believe because anger problems affect a significant proportion of the UK population.
free download at http://www.mentalhealth.org.uk/publications/boiling-point-report/
The Mental Health Foundation carried out a telephone poll involving 1974 people from all the regions in the UK, across the age groups and with a gender and social class balance. They produced The Boiling Point Report (2008) which found that
- 64% either strongly agree or agree that Britain is getting angrier
- 28% worried about how angry they become at times
- 12% reported having trouble controlling their anger
- 20% had ended a relationship with someone because of how they behaved when they were angry
I am concerned and curious about how a whole group of mental health patients can be annexed and deemed not worthy of a service. Interestingly I have come across this in The Prison Service as well where departments compete for funding and ring-fence their spending; those with anger difficulties often fall between two stools and the prison mental health department will argue that anger problems are an educational issue and the education department will argue that it is a mental health issue.
Anger management difficulties do not constitute a discrete mental health diagnosis in the DSM V but its presence or absence is a symptom of many of the diagnoses. Why do commissioning authorities and other institutions ignore anger as an issue in a way they would not ignore anxiety or depression?
