By Avinash Prabhakar

New Delhi, Nov 6 (IANS): Anger is an emotional state that varies in intensity from mild to intense fury and rage and is also accompanied by physiological and biological changes.

Like other emotions, anger is caused by both external and internal factors like one may be angry at a specific person, which is external, while getting angry at events like traffic jam or unfavourable situation can be termed as internal, say experts.

"Anger is an negative emotion which hurts the self and also others. Aggressive behaviour has been studied widely throughout the history. More stress and more dissatisfaction in life leads to more aggressive behaviour," Dr Jugal Kishore, Director, Professor and Head of Department, Community Medicine, Safdarjung Hospital, told IANS.

"As isolation, uncertainty, fragmented family ties, lot of competition and lack of social support system and social connections are on rise in the modern world, people are becoming more intolerable at any event which is not according to them."

He also said that the unawareness of self is also one of the reason for rising anger. Youths are not trained in life skills and they are aggressive. Aggressive behaviour is accepted as good in films and only methods to remove evil therefore youth are inclined to aggression, he added.

"In one of our studies we found that girls in girls schools had less aggression but in co-educational schools, girls have aggressive behaviour similar to boys. In another study we found that aggresive behaviour in schools can be reduced by like skills education and also by compassionate story telling," Dr Jugal Kishore told IANS.

Institute of Human Behaviour and Allied Sciences's former Director, Dr Nimesh Desai finds anger, like any other emotions, as natural and human as long as it is within the limits. It can also be a useful emotions if conveyed and expressed correctly, he said.

"The increase of anger can directly be linked with the sense of frustration. The frustration can be in many forms like with self or with world. The frustration is rising because of our aspirations are rising in the world of today. So, important point is to understand the difference between expression and reality," he said.

"There is no proper and adequate opportunity and situation in the current society for expression of frustration. The increasing road rage incidents are the results of accumulated frustration... if there will be any mechanism to express the frustration like talking to family, friends etc, such incidents can be curbed," Dr Desai told IANS.

To assess the mental health literacy (MHL) related to depression and anxiety among adolescents of age 15 to 19 years residing in Delhi, a survey was conducted among adolescents in southeast Delhi by the AIIMS. The MHL was assessed under domains of identifications of disorders, help-seeking behaviour, knowledge about prevention, and stigmatising attitude toward illness.

A total of 491 adolescents participated (response rate of 87.2 per cent) of whom 50.3 per cent were girls and 57.8 per cent were 15 to 17 years of age. Only 50 (10.2 per cent) participants identified depression vignette correctly and 51 (10.4 per cent) identified anxiety disorder as correctly.

The conclusion was that adolescents residing in Delhi reported poor MHL for common mental disorders, and high stigma and poor help-seeking behaviour was also observed among the participants in this regard.

Commenting on the findings, Dr Harshal Salve, Additional Professor, Centre for Community Medicine at AIIMS, said: "Common mental disorders such as depression, and anxiety are increasing among young population but most remain undiagnosed due to unrecognisable symptoms and lack of awareness. There is need to increase mental health literacy by perpetuating biomedical concepts of mental among population."

On the increasing road rage incidents because of rising anger, Dr Rohit Baluja, President, Indian Road Traffic Education, said that the poor traffic engineering and not respecting the rights of passers-by is the main reason. The whole law of the road is based upon the pillar of the right of way.

"People who respects the right of way find that their rights are violated on continuous basis, and loose the anger over repeated violations. That creates the basis of road rage. It is not the question of youth and elderly, but the whole culture of road traffic engineering and the poor enforcement of traffic management on the roads," he said.