by Ruggiero Corcella
Anger is a physiological reaction common to human beings, it responds to criteria related to stress. If it becomes chronic, it blows up the typical regulation mechanism that turns it on and off and can lead to extreme gestures
What happened in the mind of Angelika Hutter
, the 32-year-old German who on 6 July, driving an Audi, ran over a small family from Favaro Veneto in the center of Santo Stefano di Cadore and is in custody on charges of multiple vehicular homicide? The head of the Belluno prosecutor’s office, Paolo Luca, hypothesized that the woman acted in a state of anger and defined her as a person who has no capacity to contain anger. But what happens when we can’t contain our anger? And when does it become pathological behavior?
Abducted
Popular wisdom delivers to aphorisms such as blindness from anger or being blinded by anger the definition of the type of reaction capable of arising from a state of anger. A raptus, in short. What is a seizure? The medical dictionary defines it as a sudden and irresistible impulse to perform an unplanned action. It can manifest itself in states of violent emotion, in confusional psychoses, in hallucinatory crises, during an epileptic attack. The action escapes the control of the will, implying a lower degree of responsibility if criminal actions are carried out in this state the raptus can be suicidal or homicidal.
Anger arises from suffering
Anger is a momentary madness, so control this passion or it will control you wrote Homer, the Greek poet to whom the Iliad and the Odyssey are attributed. And it is precisely from the poem that describes a brief episode of the war between the Greeks and the Trojans that the psychiatrist Giancarlo Cerveri starts to try to describe the inner storm unleashed by anger.
Our cultural history was born with a text, the Iliad, which begins with the famous phrase “Sing to me, o Diva, of Pelde Achilles the fatal wrath that infinites brought mourners to the Achaeans…”. After the killing of Patroclus, his friend or lover we don’t know, by Hector Achilles goes mad. He sows massacre among the Achaeans and does not stop even in front of those who press his knees as a sign of surrender and invoke mercy. And this madness considered heroic. In reality, behind these feelings of anger lies a suffering which then leads to behaviors that sometimes go beyond common sense.
The physiological mechanisms
Anger refers to the most ancestral structures of our brain, adds Cerveri who directs the psychiatry unit of the ASST of Lodi. linked to the so-called fight or flight mechanism. Except that, in a normal situation, you return to a state of equilibrium afterwards. Instead, when exasperated it can lead to extreme acts.
Anger is a physiological reaction common to humans, it responds to criteria related to a stress to which an individual is subjected and involves a mechanism also physically regulated by the release of hormones and adrenaline: A response not only mental but also physical – explains Cerveri -. A typical characteristic of all animals that vent it with violence: in sapiens this becomes something maladaptive and creates damage to the individual and to the people around him. Especially in July and August, especially due to lack of sleep (also linked to excessive heat), the cases of people presenting to the psychiatric Emergency Department in a state of mental agitation and anger increase.
Chronic stress
In today’s society exposure to chronic stress is frequent, let’s think of the individual exposed to bullying at work or the kid exposed to bullying in class, months and months of tension, frustration, anger, fear. There are no escape routes. The stress system is constantly activated until it literally goes haywire. The individual no longer sleeps, becomes hyper-reactive to stimuli, emotions are poorly controlled. He has hand tremors when he is dealing with others. All in all, it’s bad.
Furthermore, with the stresses and frustrations typical of our times – continues Cerveri – anger tends to become chronic and blows up the typical “regulation mechanism” that turns it on and off.
July 12, 2023 (change July 12, 2023 | 12:32)
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