Are Some People Addicted to Revenge? (Nautilus)

By Catherine Offord September 18, 2025

James Kimmel remembers the first time his desire for revenge nearly ruined his life. After years of bullying him, a group of kids in his neighborhood blew up the mailbox at his home in rural Pennsylvania and shot his family’s dog. Taking a gun and following them into the night, the teenaged Kimmel intended to pull the trigger—but stopped himself just in time.

Kimmel uses this story to open his new book, The Science of Revenge: Understanding the World’s Deadliest Addiction—and How to Overcome It. In it, Kimmel, now a lawyer and an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine, describes how he went from this near-act of devastating violence to collaborating with neuroscientists to understand what drives us to punish people who hurt us.

He argues that revenge is addictive—not just figuratively speaking, but in a biological sense, much like alcohol and other drugs. His book traces a growing scientific literature indicating that even contemplating retribution against the people we think have wronged us taps into the brain’s reward circuitry. The result is a temporary buzz, followed by a comedown that leaves the brain wanting more.

In the view of Kimmel and some of his collaborators, this circuitry can push some people into a spiral of increasingly vengeful acts, despite negative consequences for them and the people around them. While “revenge addiction” isn’t a medically recognized term, Kimmel has suggested the condition may have affected numerous historical and current political figures, including U.S. President Donald Trump.
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more: https://nautil.us/are-some-people-addicted-to-revenge-1238041/



Turnip will **NEVER** agree to any kind of psychological counseling, so there's probably no hope of relief in his case.