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Q1: Our daughter is 19. She has always been quite an angry person and can become very agitated when she is under stress. Since leaving school this has become more of an issue as she has been trying to decide what career to choose etc. The last few months have become unbearable as she has been stressed with job hunting and interviews but she has now found a job and seems to be enjoying it and her behaviour appeared more settled.

However we went away as a family last week and it was very traumatic. When she is away from home she becomes very anxious and lashes out verbally at certain members of the family - mainly my husband and eldest daughter of whom she seems very jealous. We have 4 children, she is the third girl and we have a son who is the youngest. She mocked everything my husband and eldest daughter said while we were away and the whole trip was a disaster because of her.

Since returning home she has gone back to work and is acting perfectly normally and harmony has returned. It's almost as if she has two different personalities and we are just waiting for the next explosion when she becomes stressed. I know it would be simpler to just not go away as a family but it is something which is quite important to us and why should she spoil it for the rest of us?

I am at a loss as to how to tackle her when she gets like this and have not even mentioned the trip to her since returning as I feel if I say the wrong thing to her it might make things worse. Although her behaviour never causes problems outside the home it is making for a very tense and unhappy home life for us as a family and I feel we need some professional help. Name and address withheld.

A1: Obviously without knowing your daughter and your family it is impossible to be precise about the cause of her currently difficult mood. I would recommend, as I would in any case in which angry feelings are disturbing the whole household, that you discuss the case with your own GP. If he, or she, is unable to help ask for a more specialised opinion.

There are now many people who practise anger management, a form of psychotherapy, as it is a burgeoning industry. From my conversations with patients who have been to these courses the quality varies enormously. Some of its practitioners are obviously painstaking, perceptive and have a sound knowledge of psychiatry. I have had many patients who have benefited from their help.

Conversely other patients have been offered advice that is stereotypical, even trite, overly politically-correct and the opinions and recommendations that are offered too often display little insight either into the patient's psychological problems or the difficulties that their behaviour may have caused for those around them.

Unfortunately anger management courses have become one of the forms of therapy that have been devalued as courts have unrealistic expectations of what they can achieve. Similarly aggressive villains know what the therapists want to hear and so they, the villains, soon learn what to say and do to win the praise of their mentor and with it the guarantee of a good report to the authorities. They learn to keep to themselves anything, however troubling, that might be misconstrued or exaggerated by their therapist.

The reader makes an important point in linking the stressful period that her daughter is going through as one of the underlying causes of anger. Stress produces irritability and irritability is the forerunner of anger. For people who may lack self-esteem - that is possibly demonstrated by her daughter's jealousy - interviews are hell. For people who are introspective, and perhaps slightly suspicious, there is nothing more stressful than having to withstand a series of encounters the whole purpose of which is to deliver a judgment on their personality, worthiness and ability. Every time the interviewee isn't offered the job for which they are applying their sense of self-worth takes another knock, their irritability and stress levels increase and the likelihood of an explosive rage increases.

A few years ago a commercial organisation carried out extensive research on what were the stressful occasions in a family's year and why. These were found to include the obvious times when many of the family are gathered together. Christmas and important birthdays are notorious for precipitating family rows. Obviously the guests include people from different age groups, with different interests and often different lifestyles and incomes. Those attending large family gatherings may have nothing in common other than their genes, and yet all have high expectations and set opinions about what the occasions demands and what they hope from it. The research showed that a less well-recognised cause of family friction was the family holiday. If the family has tensions, even if the tensions arise from an external cause such as job seeking, it may be difficult enough to cope with them in familiar surroundings. Add on to the existing anxiety of job interviews, the tensions of travelling, the lack of amenities and frequent discomfort of a holiday home and the inability to escape from each other and there is a dry tinder with a fuse ready to be lit.