Time on task limits psychotherapy's role in reducing the societal burden of aggression.

Introduction: Aggression and violence, people's inhumanity to one another, are perhaps society's foremost problems. One approach to this problem is the provision of traditional clinical services through psychotherapy. Anger control is a learnable skill, but such learning requires "time on task." Our goal was to shed light on the potential impact of psychotherapy as a public health remedy, by studying how much psychotherapeutic intervention is being delivered to patients with impulsive aggression classified as Intermittent Explosive Disorder (IED).

Method: Using de-identified electronic health record data from TriNetX, collected from 87 medical institutions, we analyzed the distribution of psychotherapeutic sessions received by 32,322 individuals with IED.

Results: The distribution of psychotherapeutic sessions is highly skewed, resembling a curve of inverse proportion. The mode and the median for sessions attended were zero; the mean was four sessions. Only about 25% of patients received any psychotherapy. Approximately 10% attended nine visits or more; 5% 30 or more; 2% 50 or more. Eighty percent of the psychotherapeutic labor went to the 7.5% of patients who could attend over 14 sessions; about half the psychotherapeutic labor went to the 2.5% of patients who could attend 40 or more sessions. Thus, a small subset of patients absorbed most of the psychotherapeutic labor, and most patients did not spend enough (or even any) psychotherapeutic time on task.

Discussion: Traditional psychotherapy delivered through health care systems appears to deliver sufficient "time on task" to only a small subset of individuals with impulsive aggression. Multipronged public health solutions to aggression and violence must be pursued by society as a whole. The efforts of mental health professionals are important and necessary, but the job should not be delegated to clinicians alone.