Intermittent Explosive Disorder is an anger disorder that takes away your control over aggressive impulses.
Signs: Within seconds a persons mood will go from completely calm, to totally out of control and into a violent rage towards other people or property. Most of the time it will be over the smallest thing people wouldn’t even get upset about.
The Cause: is the lack of serotonin and testosterone to the frontal lobe region of the brain. (Serotonin is a brain chemical that helps a person stay calm & reason, instead of reacting too fast).
The Disorder: is found in males more than females, and the most common age is twelve to about thirty. But there are cases where the male has been much younger than adolescence and much older than thirty.
How does it affect a person? Most people have what we call a grey area of the brain, this grey area will allow a person with a normal brain to stop and rationalize the situation before reacting. A person with I.E.D. does not have this rationalizing capability, which is what causes their temper to go from 0-60 within seconds.
Whose life does it affect? Everyone that’s involved. If the child has it, the parents and other siblings in the house suffer. If the husband has it, the wife suffers while trying to protect the children.
Be aware: this disorder cannot be hidden from anyone; this illness doesn’t care when it snaps, where it snaps, or who it snaps on. (Wives, kids, grandparents, neighbors, bosses, even the family pet). It doesn’t get embarrassed whose watching either. (It could be at work, the grocery store, a restaurant, the privacy of your own home, or in the middle of a public place. This mental illness does not care whose listening. (Not even the police)
What are the common things that make a person with IED snap?
- Banging or hitting your head accidentally
- Stress
- The heat
- The inability to properly communicate feelings into words (this one strongly affects both adult males and adolescence males)
You will find when a person is having an attack the behavior from the adult male is not much different from the child’s behavior (which makes it really hard for the female who is witnessing the attack).
Watching a child flip out and start throwing stuff around their room, flipping their bed over and banging their head on the wall or smacking themselves repeatedly in the head is not near as scary as watching a full grown man do the same thing