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The Hair Dryer Incident (2014)

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Re: The Hair Dryer Incident (2014)

#81

Post by kaibee »

dantheman wrote: post #74
gwbas1c wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> could only be diagnosed with ADHD if your life was worse than "the norm" Because ADHD is a real situation for some people, and for others it's a way to legally take class-B stimulants. Yes, people really do try their friends' ADHD medication, enjoy it, and then shop around doctors to find someone who will prescribe it. It's called "drug seeking," and doctors do flag patients who do it. This, BTW, is what happens wi…

Let people take whatever medicine they want.

So like, in theory, yes, but in practice, now everyone has to take Adderall just to be able to keep up with their coworkers.

Re: The Hair Dryer Incident (2014)

#82

Post by phkahler »

teucris wrote: post #44

Having 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 hairdry…

It's critical to find any intervention that works for a debilitating problem. If the hairdryer person lost their job because of it, they may not be able to continue ANY treatment and that might be the end of them.

The first goals in DBT therapy are to stop behaviors that may interfere with therapy or kill the patient. Seems like a good approach to me.

On a related note, I knew someone who had some very self-destructive ways of dealing with her stressful life and associated problems. She held down a good professional job at and most people didn't know about her issues. She found a psychologist that she liked (and I didn't) and after somewhere between 1 and 2 years she ended up dead. You've got to stop self-destructive life-interfering problems any way you can.

When a person might be bleeding to death, the first step is to stop the bleeding even if by tourniquet. You can do surgery to fix things later, but not if the patient is dead. Priorities are a thing.

Re: The Hair Dryer Incident (2014)

#83

Post by aspyct »

I personally have problems with doors, and stuff that should be locked. I can never be sure I locked properly.

Totally did backtrack unreasonable distances just to check if I had closed the door.

It's all fine when it's my door. Worst case scenario, I get robbed.

However it's more of a problem when it's someone else's door. Worst case scenario, they get robbed, and that's a different story. Or pets get out...

Obviously I can't take the door on my front seat... So my solution is to take a picture of me trying to open the door, a kind of proof that it's closed.

And, would you know it, it works! When I get anxious, I pull out my phone and look at the pictures.

It's getting better, actually. I believe I'm fixing it slowly. Good riddance!

Re: The Hair Dryer Incident (2014)

#84

Post by caslon »

kaibee wrote: post #81
dantheman wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let people take whatever medicine they want.

So like, in theory, yes, but in practice, now everyone has to take Adderall just to be able to keep up with their coworkers.

Seems like the free market at work to me.

Re: The Hair Dryer Incident (2014)

#85

Post by JadeNB »

aspyct wrote: post #83

I personally have problems with doors, and stuff that should be locked. I can never be sure I locked properly. Totally did backtrack unreasonable distances just to check if I had closed the door. It's all fine when it's my door. Worst case scenario, I get robbed. However it's more of a problem when it's someone else's door. Worst case scenario, they get robbed, and that's a different story. Or pets get out... Obvious…

I started reading and thought "why not just …"—and you did!

Since this is Hacker News, I'm surprised that you haven't come up with some more elaborate system, e.g., properly locking the door closes a circuit, and you can check the status of the circuit remotely.

Re: The Hair Dryer Incident (2014)

#86

Post by adambard »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #77
mlyle wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In this view, if you have symptoms of ADHD but can, for instance, hold down a good job then by definition you don't have ADHD. I deleted the book from my Audible account. This may overstate the point a little bit. But there's a kernel of truth here: if you don't require some degree of significant impairment of functioning, a whole lot of criteria for mental illness would apply to huge swaths of the population. E.g.…

> if you don't require some degree of significant impairment of functioning, a whole lot of criteria for mental illness would apply to huge swaths of the population. E.g. this is why the diagnostic criteria for ADHD include: "There is clear evidence that the symptoms interfere with or reduce the quality of social, academic, or occupational functioning." Wouldn't this just tell us that these categories are completely…

The essay [1] from which the hairdryer anecdote is quoted has the thesis that categories (in general) are instrumental, and don't have much value separated from their context.

ADHD is a category of psychiatric diagnosis; psychiatric diagnoses exist to address deficiencies in function. Separating the one from the other, as you perceive, renders it meaningless -- or perhaps, useless. If one happens to have some of the traits of ADHD but it doesn't affect their life negatively, so what?

[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-ma...

Re: The Hair Dryer Incident (2014)

#87

Post by thaumasiotes »

stavros wrote: post #79
thaumasiotes wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you don't require some degree of significant impairment of functioning, a whole lot of criteria for mental illness would apply to huge swaths of the population. E.g. this is why the diagnostic criteria for ADHD include: "There is clear evidence that the symptoms interfere with or reduce the quality of social, academic, or occupational functioning." Wouldn't this just tell us that these categories are completely…

No, why? "Illness" sometimes is about the quantity, not the quality. If you enjoy the odd glass of wine once a week, you're fine, if you drink every hour of the day, not so fine.

But that's an orthogonal concern. Two people can easily display exactly the same quantity of, shall we say, ADHD-like tendencies. If one of them is a success for separate reasons, and the other one is a failure for separate reasons, why do we want to say that the failure, in addition to his other problems, also has ADHD? What do we learn from that?

If the success has a lot more ADHD-tendency than the failure, how do we defend the idea that the failure has ADHD, and the success doesn't?

Re: The Hair Dryer Incident (2014)

#88

Post by StavrosK »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #87
stavros wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, why? "Illness" sometimes is about the quantity, not the quality. If you enjoy the odd glass of wine once a week, you're fine, if you drink every hour of the day, not so fine.

But that's an orthogonal concern. Two people can easily display exactly the same quantity of, shall we say, ADHD-like tendencies. If one of them is a success for separate reasons, and the other one is a failure for separate reasons, why do we want to say that the failure, in addition to his other problems, also has ADHD? What do we learn from that? If the success has a lot more ADHD-tendency than the failure, how do…

It's not about whether the person is "a success" or "a failure", it's about whether the person feels that their condition is materially impacting their daily life. If I feel that my gaming habit is impacting my job because I can't resist playing games during work hours, that can be classified as a disorder.

It's just shorthand for "this is something we'd like to fix".

Re: The Hair Dryer Incident (2014)

#89

Post by nitrogen »

rebuilder wrote: post #76
dr_orpheus wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Variation from doctor to doctor is also wild the reactions you get out of people. Our daughter had a dairy allergy and we had observed after cutting it out her getting better. Our original pediatrician basically had the attitude of "well since you self-diagnosed this and it wasn't officially by me I'm going to largely ignore it and proceed as normal." We switched pediatricians and the difference was amazing. The resp…

Doctor 1: "Kids have all kinds of stomach problems all the time. The parents always say it's dairy or gluten. The parents don't know anything, so I'm going to ignore them." Doctor 2: "Kids have all kinds of stomach problems all the time. The parents always say it's dairy or gluten. This is probably going to go away on its own, but the parents will keep insisting I do some thing until it does. I will tell them they ar…

Doctors have to play a whole metagame

I really detest this idea that blatant manipulation is necessary from people we are supposed to be able trust. How about this instead, where the doctor provides information and a plan of action instead of manipulation:

Doctor 3: "Stomach problems are common, they may or may not be caused by the most popular triggers, and they might go away on their own by coincidence. Here's the decision tree we can follow, which will let us know if we need to do more..."

Re: The Hair Dryer Incident (2014)

#90

Post by kdmccormick »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #77
mlyle wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In this view, if you have symptoms of ADHD but can, for instance, hold down a good job then by definition you don't have ADHD. I deleted the book from my Audible account. This may overstate the point a little bit. But there's a kernel of truth here: if you don't require some degree of significant impairment of functioning, a whole lot of criteria for mental illness would apply to huge swaths of the population. E.g.…

> if you don't require some degree of significant impairment of functioning, a whole lot of criteria for mental illness would apply to huge swaths of the population. E.g. this is why the diagnostic criteria for ADHD include: "There is clear evidence that the symptoms interfere with or reduce the quality of social, academic, or occupational functioning." Wouldn't this just tell us that these categories are completely…

No. It's a misconception that mental disorders are meant to categorize folks by sets of character/personality traits, whether or not they negatively impact someone. No, you do not have "a bit of OCD" if disorganization simply stresses you out.

On the contrary, mental disorders are labels expressely intended to inform and enable treatment of distress. Disorder and treatment are inextricably linked.

This is all according to how the DSM defines things, of course. Others may have opinions on how mental disorders should be defined.

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