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Hotheaded celebrities have also found themselves in the classes. Courtney Love is an anger-management alumna. Mike Tyson's sentence last year for a flare-up of road rage included the therapy. In 1997, after breaking a beer bottle over a car, actress Shannen Doherty agreed to attend eight anger-management sessions. Blowing off such courses, or at least blowing off steam about them, has become something of a Hollywood rite. "I gotta leave this, my favorite place in the world," said rocker Tommy Lee on MTV last month, gesturing around a music studio, "to go to f______ anger management. That makes me angry." He added, "Instead of forcing it on people, what if I just go when I'm really in the mood to accept it all--and be receptive to it?" It's hard to trust a white guy with dreadlocks (not to mention a spouse abuser), but Lee is on to something. There is little evidence that anger-therapy programs work.
They are designed to impart kindergarten-level lessons about self-control. At the Brooklyn class, Greenfield came up with more or less the same advice after each person told his story: think about the consequences of what you do when you're worked up. The lone woman in the class is there because she got in a fight "with a girl who tried to cut me." Greenfield asks why she didn't call the police instead of fighting back. "If it starts in the street, it's handled in the street," the woman spits back. "That's what I'm talking about," Greenfield replies, a little exasperated. "You gotta think about these things... Sometimes we can lose control in a split-second."
The classes at New Hope/Anger Management are similarly straightforward. "We teach a simple approach--how to look at the big picture, how not to let small things bother you, how to be a good listener, how to accept someone else's opinion without going ballistic," says Larry Beard, a senior instructor.
But can you make people learn something they should already know? Pamela Hollenhorst of the University of Wisconsin's Institute for Legal Studies has reviewed academic studies of anger-management instruction and found little data to show it is effective. "It's promising, and it can be beneficial, but anger management is being inappropriately applied to people whose problems can't be addressed by such programs, people who need other kinds of therapy," says Hollenhorst. She points to those convicted of animal abuse, behavior that can lead to an anger-management sentence in some states. "Are those people really lacking control over rage behavior, or were they cruel and manipulative?" she asks. "Anger management is designed to deal with spontaneous rage, not cold, calculating people."
Researchers writing for the Justice Department called anger management a "controversial" approach when applied to those who batter their significant others. Their 1998 report cited several concerns raised about anger-management programs, chiefly that they "address a single cause of battering, ignoring other, perhaps more profound causes." Yet hitting your sweetie is one of the easiest ways to end up in anger management. About a third of the guys in the Brooklyn class are there for menacing their wives or (often former) girlfriends. "Pedro," for instance, says he had to attend because he "accidentally" banged his wife with a door when he was drunk.