It May Be All the Rage, But Does It Work?
Some doubt anger-management class helps
Some blame the lackluster results on a kid-gloves approach and question the care the classes take to avoid outright condemnation of anger. "The majority of programs try to be value neutral," says John Gibbs, a psychology professor at Ohio State University. "I really think that, unless they adopt words like `error,' `mistake,' `inaccuracy,' `wrong thinking,' they're really not going to do very much."
Steven Stosny, a Maryland therapist who works on anger issues, is similarly skeptical. He argues that teaching the potentially combustible to redirect their anger in nonharmful ways--walking around the block, deep breathing, calling "timeout" to leave a confrontation--is a quick fix that glosses over deeper "core hurts." Stosny also wonders whether lessons administered amid the cozy calm of the group circle can be recalled at times of stress. "How does Mr. Hyde remember what Dr. Jekyll learned?" he asks. There is some worry, too, that courts are too quick to assign certain offenders to anger management, when other therapies might be a better fit. A 1998 report by the National Institute of Justice railed against the use of the classes to treat spousal batterers. "Anger-management programs address a single cause of battering," the authors wrote, "ignoring other, perhaps more profound, causes." The report also blasts the legal system for viewing the therapy as a cure-all.
Pamela Stiebs Hollenhorst, a research specialist at the University of Wisconsin Law School, who has studied anger-management programs in the Madison, Wis., area, has found little proof that the therapy is useful at all. But she believes the classes are a step in the right direction. "It seems that lately the public has focused on incarceration as the answer, rather than a more rational approach to learning what works to rehabilitate criminals," says Hollenhorst. Don Shive is also confident that his class, if not a silver bullet, is at least part of the solution. "The pitch I give is, `In 15 weeks, you will not leave here a changed person,' " he says. " `But I hope you will leave here a changing person.' " Though he has never tracked whether his graduates wind up back in the criminal-justice system, he proudly states that he's never seen the same student twice.
Nikolai would certainly like to avoid a return trip, mostly because the class bored him to tears. He remembers, for example, a session in which the group spent 30 minutes coming up with synonyms for the word "anger," an experience that left him skeptical about anger management's usefulness. "I don't have much faith that they actually help people to a large extent," he says. But he doesn't mention his own record, which has been spotless since that fateful traffic stop. Shannen Doherty has been a model citizen, too. Which makes at least two victories for timeouts.
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