Intermittent Explosive Disorder

Hello Everyone, this is my sixth blog I love doing this but sometimes it is so hard to find something to write about, until it HITS you in the face. Today we are going to talk about Intermittent Explosive Disorder (IED). For those of you who do not know what that is, basically it is a rage disorder, it fits in with Impulse Control Disorder(ICD). Which I also have. These Two almost always go hand in hand.

So let me tell you why I decided to write about this, I woke up this lovely morning with trash torn up throughout my house, Sam and I's 6 month old black lab decided to throw trash around the apartment, and at five o'clock this morning he wakes me up by tearing up something and I turn on the light and see the disastrous mess around our small apartment. Not only that he tore out the bottom of my boot.

I need to explain something else to you, I have not officially been diagnosed with PTSD, but they believe i have it. So I have to explain the spectrum for a second. "Normal" people wake up in between irritated and angry, for the most part when you have PTSD you wake up between anger and rage. Now you combine this with IED and Bipolar you have one angry person.

Now back to the story, When I woke up to that mess, I was so angry I want to kill my dog, I wanted to to beat the living crap out of him. My rage was boiling my blood. I was seeing hughs of red I was so angry. It pissed me off even more that my fiance didn't help pick it up( after I calmed down I was not mad at her, she has picked the mess up a few times without me doing it). But when I am already that angry, then I am mad at everyone. When I am that angry I normally punch walls, which does not solve anything. Trust me I know I have broke my hand in the same spot because of my temper. Anyways I grab the dog and tossed him into the bathroom so he was out of my site, and jumped on the computer. I went onto facebook for awhile and was thinking about my next blog, when it dawned on me, so now I am writing this in hopes that it will help others.

I am going to give some statistics on IED and try and find some coping skill to deal with your explosive rage. Some of it will be from my experience and some will be from the net. Hope this helps you in one way or the other. Or I hope that you will learn something and put it to use to spread the word.

Intermittent Explosive Disorder  (This information comes off of the NIMH website)

IED affects more then 7.3% of adults that is 11.5-16 million Americans — in their lifetimes

To be diagnosed with IED, an individual must have had three episodes of impulsive aggressiveness "grossly out of proportion to any precipitating psychosocial stressor," at any time in their life, according to the standard psychiatric diagnostic manual. The person must have "all of a sudden lost control and broke or smashed something worth more than a few dollars…hit or tried to hurt someone…or threatened to hit or hurt someone."
People who had three such episodes within the space of one year — a more narrowly defined subgroup — were found to have a much more persistent and severe disorder, particularly if they attacked both people and property. The latter group caused 3.5 times more property damage than other violent IED sub-groups. Affecting nearly 4 percent of adults within any given year — 5.9-8.5 million Americans — the disorder leads to a mean of 43 attacks over the course of a lifetime and is associated with substantial functional impairment.

Now let's talk coping skills. The first one I am going to give you is my favorite. I just learned it last month. I swear by this. You can use it for more then just this you can use it for any crisis that comes up.

It is called a WRAP(Wellness Recovery Action Plan) Basically it is an action Plan to deal with the episodes you may go through. Now you can use this for anything. I am going to give you the first step in the plan.

Step One-

Wellness Toolbox

This is a list of things you have done in the past, or could do, to help yourself stay well; and , things you could do to help yourself feel better when you are not doing well. You will use these "tools" to develop your own WRAP. You will want a three ring binder for this and this would go in the front of the book.

Now that you have this "toolbox" when you are getting angry I want you to reffer to it, the stuff on there should not be violent, or cost anything.

I will give a short list for an example. This is stuff that I do when I am angry.

1. Sit back and think about it- why am I mad, what would happen if i got violent or yelled
2. Go for a walk.
2. Play a game
3.Talk with sam or friends

Now this is just a short list, it can be as short as you want it or as long as you want it.

Now another thing you can do to combat your rage is go to anger management, it works for some people but not all but I would still recomend it for anyone. Going and exercising is a good coping skill it is a great way to get rid of that anger.

Well I gave you a few things you can do. I hope it works.

Please feel free to leave comments about this article or if you want me to research something. I am always up for learning.

Dustin P.

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