📳 Anger issues can be managed with internet therapy

Anyone who gets extremely angry and cannot manage their anger can cause major problems both for themselves and for those around them. Now a new study shows that an internet treatment can be of great help.

"Our results indicate that a very short treatment of only four weeks administered over the internet with minimal therapist support is effective in reducing problems with anger," says Johan Bjureberg, assistant lecturer at the Center for Psychiatry Research at Karolinska Institutet and responsible researcher for the study.

The researchers also examined how different types of treatments worked. What worked best was a combination of emotional presence and cognitive reinterpretation.

Emotional presence means that participants get to practice the ability to notice and accept their feelings and thoughts without judging or acting on them. In the case of cognitive reinterpretation, they instead train the ability to reconsider thoughts and situations and find alternative thoughts that do not trigger troublesome feelings.

"Many people who have problems with anger are ashamed and we think that the internet format suits this group especially well because they don't have to wait in a reception room or sit face to face with a therapist and talk about their anger," says Johan Bjureberg.

The researchers now hope that follow-up studies will support the results and that internet treatments will become a common feature in the treatment of anger.

Read the entire study here