L11 - Anger Management

Question 1

What is anger management

Answer 1

• a form of cognitive behavioural therapy
• has 3 stage approach

Question 2

What are the 3 stages

Answer 2

• cognitive preparation
• skill acquisition
• application practice

Question 3

Cognitive preparation

Answer 3

• The offender learns to identify the cues for their anger (e.g. specific contexts or comments).
• They reflect on events in the past when they became angry.
• They consider if the way that they interpreted those events was rational.
• The therapist’s role is to help the offender redefine the situation as non-threatening.
  E.g. an offender might interpret someone looking at them as threatening, but in actual fact the person ‘looking’ at them was just lost in thought.

Question 4

Skill acquisition

Answer 4

• The offender learns skills to manage their own behaviour in anger-provoking situations.
• Techniques could be cognitive (positive self-talk to encourage calmness); behavioural (assertiveness training to communicate more effectively); or physiological (methods of relaxation and meditation).

Question 5

Application practice

Answer 5

• The offender has role-play opportunities to practice new skills and receive feedback.
• They could role-play scenarios which in the past led to anger/violence.
• The offender must take this seriously and see the scenario as real, and the therapist has to be brave and ‘wind up’ the offender.
• Successful negotiation of the role play will be met with positive reinforcement from the therapist.

Question 6

Evaluation

Answer 6

strengths
- multidisciplinary approach
- root cause
weaknesses
- anger motivation
- expensive
- commitment of participants

Question 7

Multidisciplinary approach

Answer 7

• Anger management is a multidisciplinary approach (cognitive, behavioural and social elements are included) which acknowledges that offending is a complex social and psychological behaviour, and any attempt to address it must include these different elements.

Question 8

Root cause

Answer 8

• Unlike behaviour modification, anger management tries to get to the root cause of offending behaviour (the thought processes that lead to anger/violence), rather than focusing on superficial surface behaviour.

Question 9

Anger motivation

Answer 9

• The assumption that anger causes offending may be false.
• Many crimes, such as financial crime, are not motivated by anger.
• Even murder is not always motivated by anger, Harold Shipman murdered over 215 of his patients during his time working as a GP, and his motivation was to alleviate their suffering.

Question 10

Expensive

Answer 10

• Anger management programmes are expensive to run as they require a highly trained specialist who is used to dealing with violent offenders.
• Many prisons do not have the resources to run such programmes.

Question 11

Commitment of participants

Answer 11

• The success of anger management is based on the commitment of those who participate, and this is a problem if patients are uncooperative or apathetic.