Harvard Medical School researchers, publishing in Archives of General Psychiatry this week, propose that Intermittent Explosive Disorder (IED), characterized by the DSM-IV as “recurrent episodes of aggression involving violence or destruction of property out of proportion to provocation or precipitating stressors,” afflicts 8% of adolescents and is “understudied and undertreated.” Allen Frances, chairman of the DSM-IV task force, called IED an “inherently unreliable category that probably shouldn’t be in the DSM at all.”
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Note from Kermit Cole, “In the News” editor:
Though “IED” also stands for “Improvised Explosive Device,” this article is not a joke.