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The Hair Dryer Incident (2014)

quotulatiousness.ca

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Re: The Hair Dryer Incident (2014)

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Recently I was reading a book on ADHD and the author was quite adamant that you could only be diagnosed with ADHD if your life was worse than "the norm". 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. IANAP, but that sounds correct to me. I recall the DSM requiring negative impact on one's lif…

> It would be unethical to subject someone to that risk for no possible benefit. Let's take two people, say me and Einstein. Let's say Einstein has super-severe ADHD and thus performs so poorly that he can fairly be compared to me. Is there really "no possible benefit" to curing that ADHD? Keep in mind that the real Einstein discovered relativity, and uh... I'm just going to say my contributions to science have been…

[deleted]

Re: The Hair Dryer Incident (2014)

#162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No argument here. I just don’t think the other medical professionals are given a fair shake in the original quote.

She’d seen countless psychiatrists, psychologists, and counselors, she’d done all sorts of therapy, she’d taken every medication in the book, and none of them had helped. Sounds like everything else had been given a fair shake to me.

This is the part that irked me:

> And approximately half the psychiatrists at my hospital thought this was absolutely scandalous, and This Is Not How One Treats Obsessive Compulsive Disorder

Re: The Hair Dryer Incident (2014)

#163
post #80
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…

Did you consider that the OCD could get worse due to the negative effects of the OCD, e.g., bad performance in the job or problems with the patient's relationships to friends and family? If such a feedback loop exists, breaking it can be part of the cure, no?

Breaking the cycle is important, no doubt. The issue I take is the quote makes it seem like all they had to do was carry the hair dryer with them. There’s so much more that needs to be done.

Re: The Hair Dryer Incident (2014)

#164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 accordi…

You're elaborating on how the categories are intended to be meaningless, but you're not doing much to claim that they are in fact not meaningless. If someone has low occupational functioning, you could call that a disorder. But why would you call it "ADHD"? Why would you call it ADHD for some people and OCD for other people? Suppose you have two lists of symptoms: Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder - Patient ha…

Like I understand why you are being downvoted here, your comment is kind of confrontational and kind of strawmanny, but the concern I think is quite valid and deserves a real response.

My response is, mental illness is something more personal than a broken bone and at present diagnosis needs to be cruder, which does make the categories a bit more "meaningless" but I don't think it gets all the way there.

So, like, take depression for example. I am being slightly unfair but hopefully on-the-nose when I say that DSM defines depression essentially as "you are too sad, too often, and you are not in a situation like mourning a parent or spouse where that level of sadness would be expected." The point is, it's a symptomatic diagnosis.

Other symptomatic diagnoses include “migraine” or “hypertension” or “diabetes” being symptomatic is not necessarily something that excludes meaningfulness, I think we could agree? But it also means that there is a difficulty with treatment. This medicine might work for your migraine but not her migraine; whereas my hypertension is caused by not getting a good night's sleep due to mild apnea and can be cured by a CPAP machine, his hypertension is caused by the fact that he weighs 350 pounds and CPAP therapy will fail.

OK, so like diabetes there is not just one major depression, and maybe some day we will distinguish between "type 1 depression, type 2 depression, gestational depression, predepression" and have specific causes subsumed as different "types" of the symptoms. Maybe not. But the label still has some sort of meaning, just like we can have "migraine medicine" as a group of things worth trying if you have migraines, or like how we can use insulin to handle diabetes in general and so on.

But then combine this with another question which is, "for mental illness, what does cured or managed even look like?" and that's where this occupational functioning criterion starts to look quite reasonable. Because the deal is that if "depression" isn't going to single out a particular cause, the causes of your depression will still likely be around, just like "we have you using insulin" has technically fixed your diabetes (that is, the symptom -- the hypoglycemia) but the cause is still not addressed. That these illnesses take place in the mind makes them harder to quantify. So we need a qualitative criterion, a "how bad is the pain from 1 to 10?", so that we can measure if the intervention is improving things.

Asking questions about your occupational functioning is thus a reasonable qualitative scale to indicate the severity of the symptoms and the success of treatment, even though it says nothing about cause. The different "buckets" of symptoms still make sense as they suggest categories of things-going-wrong and clusters of treatments-for-those-things.

Re: The Hair Dryer Incident (2014)

#165
To be honest: It was my first thought as well to just tell her to take the hair dryer with her to give her the peace of mind after reading halfway through the text.

Anyone who has experienced some sort of compulsory disorder would understand that.

Re: The Hair Dryer Incident (2014)

#166

I 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…

I really don't like 'the norm' as the base point. If you have the mental abilities of someone with 140 IQ with serious untreated ADHD, but your life is 'just ok', that is wasted human potential. That 'just ok' person could do so much more for society's and their own benefit.

Re: The Hair Dryer Incident (2014)

#167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a weirder version of this problem that's less debilitating but annoys people who live with me -- if I pass by a door I will automatically lock it with no memory of having done so, even seconds after. Like kleptomania but for locking doors. If I'm within five feet of a door it's as if a magic force emanates from my body to lock it as far as my own awareness is concerned. One of my roommates in college was carry…

My version of this is turning lights on. I enter a room and immediately turn the lights on, but I'm neither aware of turning them on nor aware of them being on, so I don't turn them off when I leave. Drives my wife crazy.

I added motion sensors to most rooms in my house about a year ago and I’m surprised how much of a quality of life upgrade they have been, maybe give that a shot.

It all passes the wife-test too!

Re: The Hair Dryer Incident (2014)

#168
post #166

I 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…

I really don't like 'the norm' as the base point. If you have the mental abilities of someone with 140 IQ with serious untreated ADHD, but your life is 'just ok', that is wasted human potential. That 'just ok' person could do so much more for society's and their own benefit.

That's pretty much why I threw away the book. I wouldn't meet his criteria for treatment, but I look at how much better my life is this past year and half since my diagnosis and said ... "F this".

Re: The Hair Dryer Incident (2014)

#169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you remember the name of the psychologist or any info I might use to look him up?

Scott Alexander. He used to post on slatestarcodex.com, but has since moved to astralcodexten.substack.com .

You do realize that Scott Alexander slatestarcodex astralcodexten

are all acronyms, right?

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