National Anger Awareness Week^[1] brings awareness to the increase in uncontrolled rage and its contribution to domestic violence, youth crime, prison sentences, classroom disturbances and stress related illnesses.

Timed for the run up to Christmas – one of the most stressful times of the year – National Anger Awareness Week encourages individuals, schools and the workplace to recognise the causes and symptoms of anger and provides information on counselling services and coping strategies aimed at defusing difficult situations and challenging behaviour.

Mike Fisher, Founder of the British Association of Anger Management (BAAM) aims to bring awareness to the severity of the problem and the need for services to support sufferers and their families. “National Anger Awareness Week encourages people to think about how anger impacts their lives and find ways to deal with this powerful feeling. In fact, if channelled correctly anger can be a creative rather than a destructive force,” explains Fisher.

Now in its nineteenth year, National Anger Awareness Week highlights the issues and offers ‘tools to cool’. “BAAM constantly monitors the causes of anger and we have noticed an increase in rage caused by unavoidable, everyday incidents such as traffic incidents, queue jumping, social media and frustrations with modern technology. We need to find ways to cope and with the media highlighting anger and rage in our leaders and media stars, none of us are immune from experiencing what it feels like to experience this behaviour.”

National Anger Awareness Week highlights anger as a social issue that needs to be addressed – creating greater awareness and responsibility for the causes and finding innovative, cost effective ways of preventing incidents associated with uncontrolled rage.

The British Association of Anger Management (BAAM) provides free information on National Anger Awareness Week, nationwide anger management courses and other resources aimed at supporting individuals, educators and organisations deal with anger management issues.