Los Angeles – Ray Yousef hit the brakes at the stop sign, apparently a little more quickly than the truck behind him preferred.
The computer programmer looked in his rearview mirror and saw a furious driver pop out of the vehicle, toting a shotgun.
“They think you’re just not going fast enough, I guess,” the 45-year-old Yousef said.
Most people would call it a case of road rage, but to top researchers, a psychiatric condition that leads to an uncontrollable outburst of anger is called “intermittent explosive disorder,” or IED.
Yousef, who wasn’t interested in such clinical distinctions, mashed his accelerator and sped away, a shotgun blast echoing through the air.
Such incidents are far from isolated, according to the study published Monday in the Archives of General Psychiatry. As many as 16 million Americans could suffer from IED, which can include spouse abuse or any outburst where the emotional intensity goes well beyond the situation at hand.
The nationwide study, funded by the National Institute of Mental Health and conducted by researchers at Harvard Medical School, examined more than 9,000 subjects. With as many as 7 percent experiencing some form of IED, that extrapolates to 16 million people nationwide.
The average onset came at 14 years old, predating episodes of depression, anxiety, and drug and alcohol abuse.
The average IED sufferer will fly into a rage 43 times in his or her lifetime, racking up more than $1,300 in damage to others’ personal property.
The symptoms can be treated with antidepressants or anger-management therapy, although less than one-third of sufferers have ever received treatment, said Dr. Emil Coccaro, the chairman of psychiatry at the University of Chicago’s medical school and a study author.
