ABSTRACT
Despite considerable attention given to understanding the factors that cause, promote, and maintain aggression, far less attention has been afforded to understanding how to reduce aggression at an individual level. Part of the challenge represents a lack of well-controlled intervention evaluations, an over focus on case studies or single sample designs, and outcome expectations being set too high (i.e. a focus on examining recovery as opposed to improvement). In addition, some interventions that purport to address aggression have actually focused on the broader concept of delinquency and arguably do not attend sufficiently to pure aggression theory (e.g. Violence Reduction Programme; Wong & Gordon, 2013). The current chapter aims to provide an outline of the effectiveness of aggression intervention and the components that we should expect to be included. In doing so it will highlight the importance of Multi-Modal Integrated Therapy (MMIT), a relatively new concept (Ireland & Hansen, 2015; Livesley, 2017). The chapter will not address the wider concepts of aggression intervention, such as community interventions or environmental change management, instead focusing on interventions that can be applied at the person level. The chapter will commence with an outline of core approaches to intervention, which can be separated broadly into pharmacotherapy and psychological therapies, before moving onto the core elements to consider.
