treatment for addiction usually involves the structured force-feeding of
morality, which is similar to current treatments for personality disorders.
Personality disorders wound up in their own separate category
because many psychiatrists believed that they weren’t really medical dis-
orders, meaning they couldn’t be treated with drugs, and wouldn’t improve
much, even with years of expensive psychotherapy. Such attitudes are
changing, but slowly. To this day, your medical insurance will not cover
the treatment of personality disorders.
You may be wondering why we bother with these morally and chemi-
cally impaired people at all. There are, however, two problems with ridding
ourselves of those exhibiting personality disorders. First, the symptoms of
these disorders are pervasive if not universal. Everybody has them to a cer-
tain extent. Second, and more fiendishly ironic, is the fact that much of
what makes people attractive and interesting bubbles up from the same
dark source as personality disorders. People who don’t want anything are
dull. But our desires distort our perceptions, make us do things that aren’t
good for us, and mess up our relationships with other people. The ques-
tion is: Does this make us mentally ill or human?
All of the above.
The elements of personality disorders—yours, mine, and theirs—
keep life interesting, sometimes too interesting. They also keep me
employed. If personality disorders didn’t get in the way, anybody could
treat mental illness. Everybody would get along, and you could just tell
people what to do to get better, and they would do it gratefully. A computer
program could then handle my job.
Villains and Victims
Before we begin a discussion of the disorders that make people angry,
there are several points I believe are essential to understand regarding the
entanglement of medicine and morality as it relates to anger.
First and foremost, we’re talking about youas well as them. It is not
possible to see anger from only one side of the looking glass. Anger, unlike
the other disorders we have discussed, is alwaysinteractive. What it is, and
what it will become, may be as much a function of how you react to it as
a function of the internal workings of the angry person.
208 ❧Explosions into Anger