In a culture that’s become fluent in the language of mental health, anger remains a taboo – rarely discussed, often misunderstood, usually sidelined as something to be suppressed.

Sam Parker, a journalist for GQ, is determined to change that. In his new book Good Anger, Parker argues that anger can be a vital force for personal growth, happiness and even professional success. The book is part memoir, part manifesto – and entirely a product of its cultural moment: an era when we’ve learned to hashtag our sadness and destigmatise our anxiety, but still treat anger like a contagious rash. An era when, at dinner parties, say, anger has been the unruly guest we’re expected to leave at the door – the one who might knock over the wine and say aloud what everyone else only thinks.

For Parker, the journey to writing Good Anger was as much personal as it was professional – a reckoning with his own history of anxiety, and a challenge to the mental health orthodoxy that left anger out in the cold. In this interview, we explore the personal tipping points and cultural shifts that compelled him to write Good Anger now, and why he believes it’s time to bring this powerful emotion out of the shadows.

Was there a personal tipping point or cultural moment that made you feel this book had to be written now?

As a journalist, I’ve reported closely on the mental health awareness revolution of the past five to eight years. In a relatively short space of time, we’ve dismantled centuries-old stigma around conditions like depression and anxiety. That’s been a great development, but so far anger has been very much left out of the conversation. 

And yet, over the same period in my personal life, learning about the role healthy anger plays in feeling happier and healthier proved utterly life-changing. It’s what finally broke me free of a lifetime of anxiety. So seeing this gap, between my own experiences and what I call affectionally #mentalhealth, is what convinced me to start researching the book.

I think more and more people are waking up to the fact that what we’ve always been told about anger – that it is inherently undesirable or negative – is not just wrong, but deeply damaging to us. Certainly that’s the impression I get from the response to the book so far. 

Much of the book touches on masculinity, vulnerability and emotional repression. How does Good Anger evolve or challenge these themes in the current social climate?

The conversation we’re used to having about anger centres around what psychologists call “anger out”: people who can’t stop losing their temper and getting into arguments or confrontations. That has become an even bigger topic in the social media age, where our anger is stoked while being denied any opportunity for catharsis by design, to keep us around longer on platforms like Facebook and X. 

Good Anger is, as you point out, much more about what I call the “other anger problem”: suppressing and repressing it. The vast majority of us are on that end of the spectrum. We are peace-keepers, people pleasers, conflict-avoiders… and quite often, unhappy and passive-aggressive without meaning to be as a result. “Anger in” causes much silent suffering and is, in many ways, worse for us than being hot heads.