I have, at times, pretty bad OCD - If this works and it keeps working, I'm happy for the person. In my experience though, OCD will find something else. The point about the other psychiatrist saying it's absurd is probably because they know, it will about having left her garage door open next. OCD is horrible, and nothing like what most people think; if you want to see the horrors many with the affliction deal with, head over to reddit.com/r/ocd
The Hair Dryer Incident (2014)
41–50 of 275 posts
Re: The Hair Dryer Incident (2014)
#42Many are missing the point, this is a story about transgender rights, not about psychologist knowledge. The original article, linked in the post, starts with: “I’ve made this argument before and gotten a reply something like this: Transgender is a psychiatric disorder. When people have psychiatric disorders, certainly it’s right to sympathize and feel sorry for them and want to help them. But the way we try to help t…
Oh wow, this is very cool added context. Unfortunate that the linked article doesn't include it, although the story works out of context as well.
Re: The Hair Dryer Incident (2014)
#43I heard/read a similar mental "hack" about folks who fear leaving things "on" when travelling. Take pictures with your phone of all the things just before you leave. They'd be easily available, verifiable evidence that the stove is off, all the doors are closed/locked, furnace set, water shut off, and so on.
The pictures don’t work with all ocd. Often times I would worry that I did the thing that couldn’t happen (open door, whatever) AFTER the picture. So I’d videotape the situation and myself walking away. It got silly. I really hate this condition.
Re: The Hair Dryer Incident (2014)
#44Having lived through OCD and come out the other side, I completely understand why the solution was considered bad.
Sure, this solves the particular obsession. But the issue is that OCD is never satisfied. You develop rituals like this and they work for a while, giving your brain that little dopamine boost every time you look at the hairdryer in your car. But that dose diminishes over time, and soon taking the hairdryer with you isn’t enough. You need to do something more to feel okay about the obsession. This is why OCD sufferers find themselves doing something over and over.
Sustainable solutions address the anxiety (most often meds) or build up the person’s tolerance for uncertainty (exposure response prevention). It was only a combination of these approaches that helped me overcome my illness.
Re: The Hair Dryer Incident (2014)
#45Is I was reading the first few sentences, my thought was "why don't they just take the hair dryer with them?" And then I start thinking "well, maybe that's just an outward indicator of the illness and that it would manifest in other ways, maybe they have to treat the underlying whatever, these guys are experts after all if the solution was so simple..."
Then that's exactly what happened. Maybe there are underlying problems. But maybe, and this is a stretch, medicine treats symptoms and not causes. And maybe those problems don't really matter to the people who suffer when something simple can make their lives work for them.
Re: The Hair Dryer Incident (2014)
#46Seriously, I wasn't even through the second paragraph before I thought the same thing - just take the thing with you. It doesn't try to solve the OCD, but it solves the problem. Nobody in my household has OCD, but we had a garage door that sometimes, unpredictably, would decide that there was an obstruction at the very bottom, and go back up. Did you really, really watch it go all the way down before driving off? Did…
I think a lot of smart home gadgets are stupid, but we had to get a new garage door opener and all the decent ones are smart. It's amazing. My opener sends me a notif on my phone if it's been open for 10 mins and I can close it remotely.
Re: The Hair Dryer Incident (2014)
#47The idea that the entire psychiatric community wouldn't be completely on the side of the author is one of the reasons that I have such little faith in their field. The reason being is that the underlying condition could always be worked on after first taking the small, practical steps to dramatically reduce the impact of the problem. I have personally experienced situations like this and it was so frustrating until I…
Except that the small steps that seem innocuous actually turn into dramatic problems in the case of OCD.
Re: The Hair Dryer Incident (2014)
#48Many are missing the point, this is a story about transgender rights, not about psychologist knowledge. The original article, linked in the post, starts with: “I’ve made this argument before and gotten a reply something like this: Transgender is a psychiatric disorder. When people have psychiatric disorders, certainly it’s right to sympathize and feel sorry for them and want to help them. But the way we try to help t…
I saw you were downvoted, and went and read the rest of the post to read the transgender argument. It’s a great read, the longer article is well worth perusing. I upvoted you for that.
The article’s thesis, though, is about how humans get stuck categorizing things, in ways that get canonized, and then have a hard time understanding that there are different legitimate ways to categorize. Transgender was just one example, the Hair Dryer incident another, and among them the whale-fish, and Israel vs Palestine. I love the way he framed transgender rights, and the Napoleon example is hilarious, but I wouldn’t say the story is primarily about trans rights rather than psychologist knowledge. If anything, it’s specifically showing some of the reasons why DSM 5 is so dramatically different from DSM 4, right?
Re: The Hair Dryer Incident (2014)
#49I heard/read a similar mental "hack" about folks who fear leaving things "on" when travelling. Take pictures with your phone of all the things just before you leave. They'd be easily available, verifiable evidence that the stove is off, all the doors are closed/locked, furnace set, water shut off, and so on.
The pictures don’t work with all ocd. Often times I would worry that I did the thing that couldn’t happen (open door, whatever) AFTER the picture. So I’d videotape the situation and myself walking away. It got silly. I really hate this condition.
Just recently went through my phone and spent an hour deleting all the photos I took of appliances, etc. I had taken during the height of my OCD. It must have been hundreds of pictures.
Re: The Hair Dryer Incident (2014)
#50I remember a panel on a news program years ago where the one guest was a psychologist who was treating "untreatable" drug addicts by getting them "hooked" on running or weightlifting or martial arts. They would stop drugs but would instead be doing martial arts for hours a day or running 20 miles every morning. Then he would start treating the addiction personality and causes, but in many cases the patients would jus…
Crabs in the bucket