As a volunteer EMT, I will tell you we do see many more cases during a heatwave. It’s not just heat-related illnesses and chronic conditions worsening. People are mentally off and far more prone to accidents even though just about everyone in town is air-conditioned. So, irritability is a form of being mentally off. Lots of people, male and female, PMSing.
I get mighty p.o’d standing in the sun when called to a fender-bender with no injuries, per protocol. I wouldn’t mind if I didn’t have to stand in the sun, on the blacktop. I’m wearing white bermuda shorts and the heck with being out of uniform.
This smells like the Superbowl Sunday wife-beating hoax to me.
Back when I still lived with swampcooling late July and early August were bad bad times for me. Any little thing would send me in a rage, broke a lot of my own stuff. The heat and humidity gets to you after a while. Once I moved to a place with AC that stopped, I could actually be not boiling most of the time. Alfred Hitchcock Presents had an episode about heat rage, two scientists that had predicted at one temperature a neighborhood roughian would actually take it to the point of actually killing his wife. So “heat rage” is clearly not a new concept.