20 ms·

The Hair Dryer Incident (2014)

394 points by bschne 5y ago

kayodelycaon 5y ago
Seems like a good solution to me if that was the only major issue. If the underlying cause becomes an issue again, then maybe look at longer term solutions. I’ve always had an issue with leaving light switches on. So I installed a bunch of home automation stuff. Now my light bulbs turn themselves off when I leave the house and a few turn on when I return. It’s a lot easier than trying to fix the problem of forgetting to flip switches before leaving.
- silvestrov 5y ago
  Bringing the hair dryer along can be the best road to treating the OCD, because you can then do the treatment in small steps. If people can't go swimming because they are afraid of drowning, you don't give them medication and then throw them out in the deep end. Instead you let them take as small steps into water as possible in a way where they feel in control all the time.
superjan 5y ago
While reading, I was thinking about telling her to get rid of the hairdryer, but bringing it with you is way smarter. If there was no hairdryer to worry about the mind would likely search for something new to obsess over.
- lainga 5y ago
  A bit like a lightning rod. The OCD is going to fixate on something... give it a target you can control
tyleo 5y ago
This is a great story. I know its not related but I can't help but feel a sort of analogy to engineering work: the tension between idealism and pragmatism. At a previous company our build times for a game client were around 5 minutes or so. Our tools team had planned some work to get this down but it kept getting pushed out. The tools weren't part of the client so I'm not sure they know how bad this was. Anyways, one of the tools engineers rigged up a solution in a day or so that got this down to a minute. Unfortunately it wasn't the nice, perfect, planned solution that kept getting pushed out so they were reprimanded by some manager. Fortunately, more were on the side of the engineer than the manager. To my knowledge they never did end up implementing the planned solution.
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
  It's totally related. There's the old urban myth about the "NASA Pen,"[0] which is a favorite of tech people (It isn't actually true, but it's a great story). I have a similar apocryphal story that I use in design. I write about it here[1]. > For many years, I have heard stories about some architect – they never say who – that once designed an office park/university campus/government center, etc., and deliberately did not add any paved walkways. Instead, it is said he had the buildings completely surrounded by lawns. After a year, he came back, and paved the areas of these lawns worn thin by people taking the most effective routes around the buildings. He did this because he decided at the start of the project, he’d never be able to account for human nature, and it was his goal to serve the folks using the campus as best as he could. The users of his system would let him know, organically, how to “tune” it so it can best serve them. Also, anyone that is familiar with the Granny Weatherwax character, by Sir Terry Pratchett, may remember that she practiced what was termed "Headology." That was sort of "practical" psychology, and it involved things like giving headless ghosts pumpkins, so they would stop moaning (actually, it was another character that did that -from I Shall Wear Midnight[2], but it was definitely Granny's "Headology"). [0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-nasa-spen/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-n... [1] https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/the-road-most-traveled-by/#paving https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/the-road-most-travel... [2] https://www.studynovels.com/Page/Story?bookId=27327&pageNo=61 https://www.studynovels.com/Page/Story?bookId=27327&pageNo=6...
  - nexuist 5y ago
    There's a subreddit for this: /r/DesirePath
    - ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
      Cool! Thanks for that!
  - ortusdux 5y ago
    I believe it was the podcast 99% invisible that had an episode about urban planners driving around after a heavy snow and documenting unofficial paths for later development.
gricardo99 5y ago
Engineering is filled with "hacks" and workarounds, where the root cause isn't fully understood, if at all. I feel that if, as a profession, there was immense pressure to instead find only root causes to address issues, we'd still be working out the kinks with punch-card systems.
- tonyarkles 5y ago
  Yeah, it's a really tough balance to strike. I've worked with teams and systems where they were fully happy to apply a hack and move on and it worked great for them. I've also worked with teams who had a terribly bad culture of throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks for fixing weird errors and in the process making problems worse without actually fixing the problem. Using good judgment to figure out when a hard RCA is necessary and when it's not is key to making forward progress without constantly shooting yourself (or your teammates) in the foot.
sunshineforever 5y ago
The 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 realised that I had to take personal responsibility, because help wasn't coming from within the system.
- kayodelycaon 5y ago
  I’ve had the same problems with regular doctors and medical issues. A lot of my problems turned out to be a milk allergy.
  - hallway_monitor 5y ago
    In my experience most doctors are pretty useless trying to solve a difficult problem. I had my daughter's colon biopsied before someone suggested using a hypoallergenic formula.
    - dr_orpheus 5y ago
      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 response was "I have listed to all that you have said and I agree with your assessment that she has an issue with dairy. Here are some options for her diet going forward". The difference between fighting a battle to feel heard versus feeling like someone is on your team solving a problem is incredible.
      - rebuilder 5y ago
        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 are on the right track and send them off. " Doctors have to play a whole metagame beyond just trying to figure out what might be causing the symptoms their patients are presenting with.
CalChris 5y ago
The Gordian Knot theory of psychiatry.
dr_orpheus 5y ago
I agree that its a great solution and in a way it is consistent with any other long term medical condition so I don't understand the outrage. You can try and try and try to treat the underlying medical condition. But at some point if it doesn't work you stop trying to treat the underlying medical condition and instead treat symptoms to make the patients quality of life as good as you can while living with the issue.
mindvirus 5y ago
Hah, my first instinct was "just set up a baby monitor". I can totally see not thinking of the even more obvious solution.
- tempestn 5y ago
  Similarly my thought was, "Just sell the hairdryer and deal with damp hair - it's not worth it!"
Hamuko 5y ago
I think a similar case I read somewhere was a case where someone was having trouble showering because they had body image issues and they didn't want to see their naked body in the shower. Therapist had a simple solution: "Try showering without lights on."
jmkd 5y ago
A brilliant little story with a lovely glimpse as to where scrappy solutions might come from to many kinds of problem.
acuozzo 5y ago
Hacks like this often work wonders. Reducing the burden of OCD is necessary to get in the frame of mind required to make breaking cycles a habit. Taking a daily photo of the stove dials with my iPhone helped break the cycle for me and was the first step I took on my long road of (successful!) recovery.
- teucris 5y ago
  That’s awesome! It’s funny because taking pictures was one of the major compulsions I had to break.
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- deleted 5y ago
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MarkusWandel 5y ago
Seriously, 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 you? Engineer's solution rather than psychiatrist's - simply rig something that lets you check over the internet and close the door (but not open it!) if necessary. I've since debugged the garage door too.
- Forge36 5y ago
  I had a gather like that, for like half an hour the sun would shine on the sensor and it wouldn't close. Fixed with a toilet paper role over the sensor to avoid the glare. In my current house I have homeassistant and a sensor so I can check if it's closed/auto close after ~10 minutes (I'd set it to 5 but that was too aggressive). Haven't worried since
  - MarkusWandel 5y ago
    In my case the rails were misadjusted so the door would contact the frame before it was all the way down. The friction would sometimes, just sometimes, trigger the overtorque sensor, but only when the door was about an inch or two from the bottom. Fixed by adjusting the rails.
  - mark-r 5y ago
    I had a garage door problem with the sun too. I tried the toilet paper roll trick, but it was only partially effective. Finally had to replace the sensor.
- kleinsch 5y ago
  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.
- 5y ago
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OscarCunningham 5y ago
> If one day I open up my own psychiatric practice, I am half-seriously considering using a picture of a hair dryer as the logo, just to let everyone know where I stand on this issue. He didn't, as it turns out. https://lorienpsych.com/ https://lorienpsych.com/
frereubu 5y ago
This reminds me of the British Psychiatrist R.D. Laing who had a kind of "open house" for people with mental health issues in the late 60s / early 70s, where they could go and live untreatead except as they wished. (There were obvious limits to this, such as violent people not being admitted). One person came to stay and wouldn't talk to anyone, spending the vast majority of his time in his room, and becoming very irritated if anyone spoke to him. He became more and more withdrawn and stopped eating, and the psychiatric team were very concerned about his wellbeing as his weight dropped. One morning he came down from his room, smiling, and asked for a large breakfast. It turned out that he had been trying to count up to one million and back to zero and every time someone spoke to him he'd lose count. Once he'd managed to do it the spell was broken and he was essentially "cured". There are obvious ethical concerns about his treatment, and I often wonder whether he just lapsed back into some other compulsion, but it does make me wonder a great deal about the lack of individual attention and creative thinking about treatments for for patients with mental health issues that the hairdryer incident points to. Found the story: https://www.madinamerica.com/2013/11/living-one-r-d-laings-post-kingsley-hall-households/ https://www.madinamerica.com/2013/11/living-one-r-d-laings-p...
quwert95 5y ago
A friend told me a story similar to this where a psychologist helped a patient with their taxes and credit card debt, the patient was immediately more functional as a result. The crux of it being that academically this is the "wrong" solution because the textbook and journals don't cite it as a valid one. But a medical professional's job is to not only treat symptoms, but to treat the underlying problems as a person. This was the right solution for this particular person. Yes, it doesn't scale, but neither does perfect medical care in general. There is a difference between "triage" and "care".
ElViajero 5y ago
Many 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 them is by treating their disorder, not by indulging them in their delusion.” And then goes to explain the "Hair Dryer Incident" as a counter point.
- nexuist 5y ago
  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.
- dahart 5y ago
  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?
hawkesnest 5y ago
I 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.
- rootusrootus 5y ago
  That's cheaper than my solution, which was to make the status of the door locks, garage doors, furnace, etc, all verifiable via home automation. And with backups for some of them, like auto-closing garage doors. I used to have a problem where I'd get a half mile from home and have to turn around and verify the garage doors were in fact closed. Never once did I return to find them open. But now I can just pull it up on the phone. Pictures is a cheaper way of accomplishing that, not a bad idea.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  level 2 of that game, tho': "Is the list I made to know what to take pictures of complete? Did I really take pictures of everything? What about that thing I'm not remembering right now and wasn't on the list but I'm pretty sure I didn't turn it off, either ..."
  - renewiltord 5y ago
    Sunflower Labs https://www.sunflower-labs.com/ https://www.sunflower-labs.com/ and Ring will have products for you. The latter is only $250 and you can stick a drone at home you can look through. I think you could also just stick one of the Amazon Echo Shows that has Drop-in or Auto-Answer or whatever (the Google Nests don't, disappointingly).
    - Animats 5y ago
      you can stick a drone at home you can look through. Is the Amazon home drone a real product, or was that just a CGI demo?
insickness 5y ago
This story sounds like it should be posted in the subreddit "and everyone clapped." Any therapist worth their salt would consider both practical solutions as well as treatment of the underlying cause. If your depression were triggered by job loss, they'd urge you to look for another job as well as figure out how to prevent/treat the depression itself. I'm skeptical that the other psychiatrists thought the practical portion of this treatment was scandalous. The only reason the other psychiatrists may have objected to his 'treatment' is if the psychiatrist who recommended this solution considered the problem solved after just applying the practical solution. The OCD is likely to find another way into this person's life, whether it's checking lights or the stove or something else. It's a pathology and pathologies don't typically resolve themselves by making a minor life change.
- jetrink 5y ago
  The writer is a well-known and well-liked psychiatrist/blogger who does not have a reputation for lying. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slate_Star_Codex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slate_Star_Codex
willcipriano 5y ago
I had a weird tick as a kid where anytime someone said something to me I had to mentally adjust the length of the statement so the number of words was divisible by 5. So for example if you said "Are you going to school today?" I'd add "my good friend, Will" in my mind. It drove me nuts, but I was unable to stop. Then one day it just went away. Still have no idea what that was but it plagued most of my childhood. I remember when I noticed that I didn't have to do that anymore and it was probably the happiest I felt prior to my daughters birth. Never told anyone about it before this comment. It's a strange thing to try and explain to someone.
- spicybright 5y ago
  Have you considered writing children's books? :) /s It's so interesting how many weird states our brains can get into like that. Congrats on kicking the habit though!
- zentiggr 5y ago
  I've had a habit for my entire adult life, of sorting the letters of words alphabetically in my head. The longer the word the better. It's even better when the sorted letters turn out to make any sort of repetitive pattern. And I count stairs, unless I specifically override the internal voice and say "1", "1", "1", "1,".... to myself.
  - Zababa 5y ago
    I used to count stairs when I was younger too, and remember that most of them had between 16 and 18 steps for a floor.
  - agency 5y ago
    I don’t mean to be glib but are you really good at Scrabble? I believe the strategy at the competitive level is similar to what you’ve described: Memorizing essentially an index of words by the alphabetized sequence of letters, then you keep your tiles in alphabetical order and “look them up”
  - teddyh 5y ago
Ensorceled 5y ago
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 just stop coming and live three or more hours of every day in the gym. The other guests were various degrees of horrified. His patients went from literally living on the street as heroin addicts to doing 3 hour gym sessions and holding down a job; and his peers thought he shouldn't be allowed to practice. 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.
- frickenhamster 5y ago
  Crabs in the bucket
- mlyle 5y ago
  > 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. 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."
  - thaumasiotes 5y ago
    > 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 meaningless?
bigmattystyles 5y ago
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
teucris 5y ago
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 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.
- betwixthewires 5y ago
  Well, you can call it a stopgap. As long as they're not saying "cured! It's over for you now." I think it is great. Why does the patient have to live through the debilitating symptom while the causes are worked on? Perhaps a part of the treatment then is getting the patient to leave the dryer at home on weekends, maybe initially curled up on the coffee table, then in the bathroom, etc. while they go to the grocery store or for a jog. It could be a very good first step. I have a compulsive problem that developed due to an anxious situation I was in. I was taking a nap on the couch, I smelled burning and assumed it was someone in my neighborhood grilling, which was common. I woke up to an apartment filled with smoke, my place was on fire. It was small, I was able to get out the front door (which is where the fire was) and call the fire department, they came and put it out, minimal damage, no loss of life. But still, since then, if I smelled wood burning, even though I know it's probably someone grilling or with a fire in the fireplace I go outside and look around just to be sure. It is irrational and I know while I'm doing it. What helped me was living in a place where some neighbor or other burns wood almost daily. I still get a tinge of "but what if that's not what it is this time" every time I smell it, but I don't compulsively check anymore. Also for a lot of people these mental illnesses cannot be cured, only managed. I'd think finding simple solutions to reduce compulsive anxiety are more sustainable than long term drug use.
  - teucris 5y ago
betwixthewires 5y ago
Is 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.
spicybright 5y ago
This is very much paralleled with non-techies solving techie problems eloquently. A few weeks ago there was a story in a company where the financial department used pretty old computers that didn't run anyone else's software. They were the only ones that could use it. When asked, they said they were tired of the programmers mucking around with their machines so they just didn't use anything they knew. A knee jerk techie solution would probably be password login systems with someone holding the "keys" to it. Maybe some kind of other procedures. Or just do the above!
bullen 5y ago
I actually have a triple buffered solution for this on my stove and water pump in the summer house (which has dodgy electric wiring and home made plumbing): 1) Manual switch with a light when on. 2) Timer (runs max 60 minutes, makes some clicking noise when on) 3) Remote switch that I can turn off with my mobile phone from anywhere. That way if I forget to manually switch things off, I can turn the remote switch off and if that fails the stove and pump are powered maximum 60 minutes = wont burn the house down or flood it too much hopefully. In a future without insurance this is the only way to have a modern life without bringing the pump and stove with you! Xo By the way I don't think she had OCD, I think everyone else is reckless.
cowboysauce 5y ago
I've read most of Scott's blog posts and he rarely mentions OCD and when he does it tends to be "this is what I think people with OCD experience" and not "this is what my patients have told me" which leads me to believe that he is not an expert in OCD. I have OCD and it's ruined my life in ways that are hard to articulate. Which is why I can point out two good reasons why what's being described might not be a good idea. First, giving into compulsions just legitimizes them and reinforces the patterns that are central to OCD and can ultimately make things worse. Secondly, OCD has a habit of changing how it manifests. Sure, maybe the woman is no longer bothered by the hairdryer, but what happens when it becomes changes to worrying if the oven is on? She'll be right back where she started. I doubt that the anecdote actually happened as described. It's way too contrived, simplistic and borders on "Psychiatrists hate her! Cure your OCD with this one simple trick!". Realistically, OCD is incredibly insidious and if it were that simple to cure then nobody would have OCD. What's described is, at best, a short-term fix and half the psychiatrists likely knew that such things rarely stick. I've had the same thing happen to me more times than I can count. I think I found the silver bullet, a way to permanently defeat my obsessive thoughts. If I'm lucky then it'll last a week before my OCD comes back in full force. But the truth is that you cannot directly fight OCD, it's like squeezing dough. When you clamp down in one spot, it just squirts out somewhere else. There's a quote that I think describes it perfectly "To hate me is to give me breath, to fight me is to give me strength". Fighting OCD or giving into its demands is just falling into its traps. You only truly win when you reach a point where you don't respond to it.
- caethan 5y ago
  Scott has OCD. Search for "obsessive compulsive disorder" here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/11/going-loopy/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/11/going-loopy/
  - cowboysauce 5y ago
    That's strange. My impression came from his article about the Chamber of Guf where he talks about pure OCD, but it sounds like he's only read about it and never actually met someone with it. I wonder if the disconnect is in taking the story in an idealistic way vs a practical way. Like sure, if you had someone for whom that works utterly when nothing else works then yeah, do that. But I don't think that's a realistic scenario.
Fleetfantasy 5y ago
As an OCD haver of over 20 years, I find these suggestions to be pretty wonderful. In some of cases, these conditions can't be fixed by therapy, and/or the drugs don't work. Therapy is fantastic, but sometimes these things can be the difference between getting out of bed in the morning & not. Finding these solutions can be absolute bliss - technology for 'hands-off' switching off things is one for me. As with everything it's a balance, but if something small helps in a big way, that's a win for me!
aspyct 5y ago
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!
- JadeNB 5y ago
  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.
  - SamBam 5y ago
    I don't worry too much about whether I left the door locked or unlocked, but suck a system would produce anxiety in me, because I could never be sure if there wasn't some circuit malfunction and it wasn't showing me a false positive or negative. My wife and I had the exact same response to the baby wearables or gadgets that promised to tell us if our baby was still breathing up in her crib. We weren't worried about that, so the notion of adding something that would almost-certainly be a flaky indicator seemed guaranteed to increase anxiety.
    - aspyct 5y ago
      Spot on, mate!
  - aspyct 5y ago
    Ahah, I absolutely did! And sibling commenter SamBam got it exactly right :D
legitster 5y ago
This story is cute, but my concern for calling it a treatment method is.. what is stopping the OCD from transferring to a new concern? Surely, it's not about the actual hair dryer. If they suddenly get concerned about leaving the heat on or the lamp plugged in they will quickly run out of room in the car.
- tonyarkles 5y ago
  You're right, but it could be enough of a workaround to help this person in the short-term to be able to spend the time long-term to better address the problem. For example, if they're completely distracted 10 minutes into therapy because the hair dryer might be on, it's going to be pretty difficult to actually engage.
- renewiltord 5y ago
  The way I see it is that if a server has run out of disk space, I first find the largest file, find the processes with that file open, truncate the file and restart them, and only then do I diagnose how I even ran into disk space issues. If I don't do that, I might lose uptime. This gives me head room.
ngvrnd 5y ago
SSC FTW
tibbydudeza 5y ago
In my case it is my remote garage doors. Sometimes worry that I did not press the button on the remote to close them when I left home so I would drive pass my home again after dropping off the kids at school. Fortunately distance to school/home/freeway to work is within a few minutes of each other. Later installed an IP camera - told the wife it was for home security and not monitoring the garage doors.
- Markoff 5y ago
  distance/door sensor would be probably cheaper (they cost like 5 dollars), though you would need to trust its reliability more than IP camera
  - tibbydudeza 5y ago
    I think this was triggered when I came home one day and the garage door was open - suspect it was due to somebody using the same channel as me for theirs or I really forgot to close it. Replaced it with a rolling code controller board as a precaution to eliminate one possible cause.
P4u1 5y ago
That's amazing. Before I finished reading the article I thought one solution could be to throw the hair dryer away, and just use a towel or something(not ideal but beats being miserable I guess). But taking the hair dryer with her was way better.
swayvil 5y ago
If she suffered from an obsessive compulsion to review her case-notes in her head all waking hours, which made her into a better lawyer, we'd never even hear of this. Other useful forms of this "insanity" may be seen in engineers, scientists, writers... So UTILITY is definitely already the basis for any further judgment or antidote. We can say that. So taking the hairdryer with you is already entirely appropriate. An ideal of sanity is not our aim here. Never was. Never should be (unless that's your own personal thing).
cbmuser 5y ago
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.
fungiblecog 5y ago
Is this about mental illness or the stupidity of people? Literally the first thing I thought was "Just take the f**ng thing with you"
aazaa 5y ago
This quote is from a longer article. The specific comparison made there is how we relate to transgender people. > Imagine if we could give depressed people a much higher quality of life merely by giving them cheap natural hormones. I don’t think there’s a psychiatrist in the world who wouldn’t celebrate that as one of the biggest mental health advances in a generation. Imagine if we could ameliorate schizophrenia with one safe simple surgery, just snip snip you’re not schizophrenic anymore. Pretty sure that would win all of the Nobel prizes. Imagine that we could make a serious dent in bipolar disorder just by calling people different pronouns. I’m pretty sure the entire mental health field would join together in bludgeoning anybody who refused to do that. We would bludgeon them over the head with big books about the side effects of lithium. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-ma...
m463 5y ago
What's sort of disappointing is that many online games are capitalizing on these kinds of maladies. A friend worked for a company, and hoarding behavior is one of the things baked into the game. People collect things, and some people compulsively so. I would imagine "whales" might correlate with this.
mdavis6890 5y ago
Well if I got nothing else out of this HN discussion, I at least feel a whole lot better about all the crazy sh*t going on in my own head. Thanks!
emmelaich 5y ago
There was a tiny article / amusing note in the Reader's Digest a long time ago. A host was offended that the guest had brought a radiator with them - it was in the front passenger's seat in clear sight. The guest explained that it was the only way they knew to make sure that it was off. So, a somewhat old solution. But perhaps not so well-known.
teddyh 5y ago
Blog spam of https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-ma...
d136o 5y ago
would anyone agree that being a professional programmer encourages this type of OCD behavior? I enjoy getting lost in the code/algorithms/craft, but sometimes I'm afraid of going all in for fear it's not so healthy/balanced.
Gatsky 5y ago
This is the medical version of 'A Short Story for Engineers': https://userweb.cs.txstate.edu/~br02/cs1428/ShortStoryForEngineers.htm https://userweb.cs.txstate.edu/~br02/cs1428/ShortStoryForEng...
- hidroto 5y ago
  i hate that parable. they realy spent 8million and 20 dollars on a solution. would that worker have used a fan if the alarms were not there?
bipson 5y ago
Call me a "uneducated layman" but that advice was my very first impulse while reading the pain the patient is going through. Thankfully in psychiatry there is a push for "treating what is bothering you" against the Freudian "dig for the cause" - often patients are not served at all by the tedious and painful search for cause or roots of an itch, they just need a working remedy.
Markoff 5y ago
bringing the hair dryer with her was also my initial idea, other option getting completely rid off hair dryer would be other option
noduerme 5y ago
This is a great frickin story. I have pretty severe OCD and I treat myself this way. You basically can't have mercy with your own stupid terrors about objects if you have OCD. Taking the hair drier with you is brilliant. What the other shrinks should have noticed is that this is taking the power of agency away from the object and returning it to the owner. OCD people like me follow a certain thought process: 1. I need to do this [thing] or [something] bad will happen. 2. Nothing bad happened. I'm not wounded or dead. That was because I did [thing]. 3. If I hadn't switched the blender on and off 14 times today before I walked out the house, I might have walked out 30 seconds earlier and been hit by a bus. Therefore even as irrational as it seems, the wasted time on the blender was enough to keep me in the right timeline where I'm still alive and breathing. 4. Therefore whenever I get an irrational impulse to do something that might delay me, I should do it, because that's what keeps me on the timeline where I'm not hit by a bus. Just because none of this can be cured by someone speaking rationally to you and telling you you're insane, doesn't mean that it can or should be cured by mood-altering chemicals. The only answer for me has been demonstration to myself, i.e., I didn't slam the door six times but I didn't get cancer. etc. However, the biggest motivator was my ex-gf who used to wake up when I was folding my pants over and over, and go, WILL YOU FRIGGIN LAY DOWN? Last thought here. Drawing connections between what happens and what happened prior is a fine art, and one that's richly rewarded in the right corners of hackerdom. There's no shortage of people who lack the ability to see the most basic cause/effect and are willing to pay you to tease those things out of the data, or out of your ass. I consider OCD to be an asset, not a fault, as long as it can be channeled properly. It may have saved my life. BUT yeah about stupid shit like hair driers, just show people the obvious. Being OCD doesn't mean you're an idiot, and if you swallow the pill that says "I won't die because X" you open more doors to other rational thoughts. OCD is just your brain stuck in an if/then pattern. Several elses may cure a big chunk of it.
oxplot 5y ago
I was puzzled by the responses of therapists finding out about this. I guess as an engineer I’m always thinking of a quick practical solution. I would set up a camera where the dryer is. Taking the dryer itself is of course much better and simpler. What I find absolutely dumb is to skip these immediate remedies and instead trying to medicate someone off the bat. It’s like prescribing a healthy exercise regime for someone who’s having a heart attack.
peter_retief 5y ago
Is this actually true?
teekert 5y ago
Nice! I solve this for myself with smart plugs haha, I am otherwise a pretty normal person, but sometimes one must think in solutions, not problems. Get some sensors people, and learn about Home Assistant ;)
saul_goodman 5y ago
Reminds me of the old medical dialog: Person: "Dr, it hurts when I do this" Dr: "Well don't do that then"
alangibson 5y ago
You're either solving problems, or you're jerking off. In this particular case, for this particular problem, the intervention solved the problem. Nothing left to discuss.
hidroto 5y ago
it took me five minutes of reading these comments to realize we were talking about a hair dryer and not a colthes dryer.

394 points by bschne 5y ago

Seems like a good solution to me if that was the only major issue. If the underlying cause becomes an issue again, then maybe look at longer term solutions. I’ve always had an issue with leaving light switches on. So I installed a bunch of home automation stuff. Now my light bulbs turn themselves off when I leave the house and a few turn on when I return. It’s a lot easier than trying to fix the problem of forgetting to flip switches before leaving.

silvestrov 5y ago
Bringing the hair dryer along can be the best road to treating the OCD, because you can then do the treatment in small steps. If people can't go swimming because they are afraid of drowning, you don't give them medication and then throw them out in the deep end. Instead you let them take as small steps into water as possible in a way where they feel in control all the time.

superjan 5y ago

While reading, I was thinking about telling her to get rid of the hairdryer, but bringing it with you is way smarter. If there was no hairdryer to worry about the mind would likely search for something new to obsess over.

lainga 5y ago
A bit like a lightning rod. The OCD is going to fixate on something... give it a target you can control

tyleo 5y ago

This is a great story. I know its not related but I can't help but feel a sort of analogy to engineering work: the tension between idealism and pragmatism. At a previous company our build times for a game client were around 5 minutes or so. Our tools team had planned some work to get this down but it kept getting pushed out. The tools weren't part of the client so I'm not sure they know how bad this was. Anyways, one of the tools engineers rigged up a solution in a day or so that got this down to a minute. Unfortunately it wasn't the nice, perfect, planned solution that kept getting pushed out so they were reprimanded by some manager. Fortunately, more were on the side of the engineer than the manager. To my knowledge they never did end up implementing the planned solution.

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
It's totally related. There's the old urban myth about the "NASA Pen,"[0] which is a favorite of tech people (It isn't actually true, but it's a great story). I have a similar apocryphal story that I use in design. I write about it here[1]. > For many years, I have heard stories about some architect – they never say who – that once designed an office park/university campus/government center, etc., and deliberately did not add any paved walkways. Instead, it is said he had the buildings completely surrounded by lawns. After a year, he came back, and paved the areas of these lawns worn thin by people taking the most effective routes around the buildings. He did this because he decided at the start of the project, he’d never be able to account for human nature, and it was his goal to serve the folks using the campus as best as he could. The users of his system would let him know, organically, how to “tune” it so it can best serve them. Also, anyone that is familiar with the Granny Weatherwax character, by Sir Terry Pratchett, may remember that she practiced what was termed "Headology." That was sort of "practical" psychology, and it involved things like giving headless ghosts pumpkins, so they would stop moaning (actually, it was another character that did that -from I Shall Wear Midnight[2], but it was definitely Granny's "Headology"). [0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-nasa-spen/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-n... [1] https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/the-road-most-traveled-by/#paving https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/the-road-most-travel... [2] https://www.studynovels.com/Page/Story?bookId=27327&pageNo=61 https://www.studynovels.com/Page/Story?bookId=27327&pageNo=6...
- nexuist 5y ago
  There's a subreddit for this: /r/DesirePath
  - ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
    Cool! Thanks for that!
- ortusdux 5y ago
  I believe it was the podcast 99% invisible that had an episode about urban planners driving around after a heavy snow and documenting unofficial paths for later development.

gricardo99 5y ago

Engineering is filled with "hacks" and workarounds, where the root cause isn't fully understood, if at all. I feel that if, as a profession, there was immense pressure to instead find only root causes to address issues, we'd still be working out the kinks with punch-card systems.

tonyarkles 5y ago
Yeah, it's a really tough balance to strike. I've worked with teams and systems where they were fully happy to apply a hack and move on and it worked great for them. I've also worked with teams who had a terribly bad culture of throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks for fixing weird errors and in the process making problems worse without actually fixing the problem. Using good judgment to figure out when a hard RCA is necessary and when it's not is key to making forward progress without constantly shooting yourself (or your teammates) in the foot.

sunshineforever 5y ago

The 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 realised that I had to take personal responsibility, because help wasn't coming from within the system.

kayodelycaon 5y ago
I’ve had the same problems with regular doctors and medical issues. A lot of my problems turned out to be a milk allergy.
- hallway_monitor 5y ago
  In my experience most doctors are pretty useless trying to solve a difficult problem. I had my daughter's colon biopsied before someone suggested using a hypoallergenic formula.
  - dr_orpheus 5y ago
    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 response was "I have listed to all that you have said and I agree with your assessment that she has an issue with dairy. Here are some options for her diet going forward". The difference between fighting a battle to feel heard versus feeling like someone is on your team solving a problem is incredible.
    - rebuilder 5y ago
      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 are on the right track and send them off. " Doctors have to play a whole metagame beyond just trying to figure out what might be causing the symptoms their patients are presenting with.

CalChris 5y ago

The Gordian Knot theory of psychiatry.

dr_orpheus 5y ago

I agree that its a great solution and in a way it is consistent with any other long term medical condition so I don't understand the outrage. You can try and try and try to treat the underlying medical condition. But at some point if it doesn't work you stop trying to treat the underlying medical condition and instead treat symptoms to make the patients quality of life as good as you can while living with the issue.

mindvirus 5y ago

Hah, my first instinct was "just set up a baby monitor". I can totally see not thinking of the even more obvious solution.

tempestn 5y ago
Similarly my thought was, "Just sell the hairdryer and deal with damp hair - it's not worth it!"

Hamuko 5y ago

I think a similar case I read somewhere was a case where someone was having trouble showering because they had body image issues and they didn't want to see their naked body in the shower. Therapist had a simple solution: "Try showering without lights on."

jmkd 5y ago

A brilliant little story with a lovely glimpse as to where scrappy solutions might come from to many kinds of problem.

acuozzo 5y ago

Hacks like this often work wonders. Reducing the burden of OCD is necessary to get in the frame of mind required to make breaking cycles a habit. Taking a daily photo of the stove dials with my iPhone helped break the cycle for me and was the first step I took on my long road of (successful!) recovery.

teucris 5y ago
That’s awesome! It’s funny because taking pictures was one of the major compulsions I had to break.

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MarkusWandel 5y ago

Seriously, 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 you? Engineer's solution rather than psychiatrist's - simply rig something that lets you check over the internet and close the door (but not open it!) if necessary. I've since debugged the garage door too.

Forge36 5y ago
I had a gather like that, for like half an hour the sun would shine on the sensor and it wouldn't close. Fixed with a toilet paper role over the sensor to avoid the glare. In my current house I have homeassistant and a sensor so I can check if it's closed/auto close after ~10 minutes (I'd set it to 5 but that was too aggressive). Haven't worried since
- MarkusWandel 5y ago
  In my case the rails were misadjusted so the door would contact the frame before it was all the way down. The friction would sometimes, just sometimes, trigger the overtorque sensor, but only when the door was about an inch or two from the bottom. Fixed by adjusting the rails.
- mark-r 5y ago
  I had a garage door problem with the sun too. I tried the toilet paper roll trick, but it was only partially effective. Finally had to replace the sensor.
kleinsch 5y ago
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.
5y ago

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OscarCunningham 5y ago

> If one day I open up my own psychiatric practice, I am half-seriously considering using a picture of a hair dryer as the logo, just to let everyone know where I stand on this issue. He didn't, as it turns out. https://lorienpsych.com/ https://lorienpsych.com/

frereubu 5y ago

This reminds me of the British Psychiatrist R.D. Laing who had a kind of "open house" for people with mental health issues in the late 60s / early 70s, where they could go and live untreatead except as they wished. (There were obvious limits to this, such as violent people not being admitted). One person came to stay and wouldn't talk to anyone, spending the vast majority of his time in his room, and becoming very irritated if anyone spoke to him. He became more and more withdrawn and stopped eating, and the psychiatric team were very concerned about his wellbeing as his weight dropped. One morning he came down from his room, smiling, and asked for a large breakfast. It turned out that he had been trying to count up to one million and back to zero and every time someone spoke to him he'd lose count. Once he'd managed to do it the spell was broken and he was essentially "cured". There are obvious ethical concerns about his treatment, and I often wonder whether he just lapsed back into some other compulsion, but it does make me wonder a great deal about the lack of individual attention and creative thinking about treatments for for patients with mental health issues that the hairdryer incident points to. Found the story: https://www.madinamerica.com/2013/11/living-one-r-d-laings-post-kingsley-hall-households/ https://www.madinamerica.com/2013/11/living-one-r-d-laings-p...

quwert95 5y ago

A friend told me a story similar to this where a psychologist helped a patient with their taxes and credit card debt, the patient was immediately more functional as a result. The crux of it being that academically this is the "wrong" solution because the textbook and journals don't cite it as a valid one. But a medical professional's job is to not only treat symptoms, but to treat the underlying problems as a person. This was the right solution for this particular person. Yes, it doesn't scale, but neither does perfect medical care in general. There is a difference between "triage" and "care".

ElViajero 5y ago

Many 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 them is by treating their disorder, not by indulging them in their delusion.” And then goes to explain the "Hair Dryer Incident" as a counter point.

nexuist 5y ago
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.
dahart 5y ago
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?

hawkesnest 5y ago

I 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.

rootusrootus 5y ago
That's cheaper than my solution, which was to make the status of the door locks, garage doors, furnace, etc, all verifiable via home automation. And with backups for some of them, like auto-closing garage doors. I used to have a problem where I'd get a half mile from home and have to turn around and verify the garage doors were in fact closed. Never once did I return to find them open. But now I can just pull it up on the phone. Pictures is a cheaper way of accomplishing that, not a bad idea.
PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
level 2 of that game, tho': "Is the list I made to know what to take pictures of complete? Did I really take pictures of everything? What about that thing I'm not remembering right now and wasn't on the list but I'm pretty sure I didn't turn it off, either ..."
- renewiltord 5y ago
  Sunflower Labs https://www.sunflower-labs.com/ https://www.sunflower-labs.com/ and Ring will have products for you. The latter is only $250 and you can stick a drone at home you can look through. I think you could also just stick one of the Amazon Echo Shows that has Drop-in or Auto-Answer or whatever (the Google Nests don't, disappointingly).
  - Animats 5y ago
    you can stick a drone at home you can look through. Is the Amazon home drone a real product, or was that just a CGI demo?

insickness 5y ago

This story sounds like it should be posted in the subreddit "and everyone clapped." Any therapist worth their salt would consider both practical solutions as well as treatment of the underlying cause. If your depression were triggered by job loss, they'd urge you to look for another job as well as figure out how to prevent/treat the depression itself. I'm skeptical that the other psychiatrists thought the practical portion of this treatment was scandalous. The only reason the other psychiatrists may have objected to his 'treatment' is if the psychiatrist who recommended this solution considered the problem solved after just applying the practical solution. The OCD is likely to find another way into this person's life, whether it's checking lights or the stove or something else. It's a pathology and pathologies don't typically resolve themselves by making a minor life change.

jetrink 5y ago
The writer is a well-known and well-liked psychiatrist/blogger who does not have a reputation for lying. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slate_Star_Codex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slate_Star_Codex

willcipriano 5y ago

I had a weird tick as a kid where anytime someone said something to me I had to mentally adjust the length of the statement so the number of words was divisible by 5. So for example if you said "Are you going to school today?" I'd add "my good friend, Will" in my mind. It drove me nuts, but I was unable to stop. Then one day it just went away. Still have no idea what that was but it plagued most of my childhood. I remember when I noticed that I didn't have to do that anymore and it was probably the happiest I felt prior to my daughters birth. Never told anyone about it before this comment. It's a strange thing to try and explain to someone.

spicybright 5y ago
Have you considered writing children's books? :) /s It's so interesting how many weird states our brains can get into like that. Congrats on kicking the habit though!
zentiggr 5y ago
I've had a habit for my entire adult life, of sorting the letters of words alphabetically in my head. The longer the word the better. It's even better when the sorted letters turn out to make any sort of repetitive pattern. And I count stairs, unless I specifically override the internal voice and say "1", "1", "1", "1,".... to myself.
- Zababa 5y ago
  I used to count stairs when I was younger too, and remember that most of them had between 16 and 18 steps for a floor.
- agency 5y ago
  I don’t mean to be glib but are you really good at Scrabble? I believe the strategy at the competitive level is similar to what you’ve described: Memorizing essentially an index of words by the alphabetized sequence of letters, then you keep your tiles in alphabetical order and “look them up”
- teddyh 5y ago

Ensorceled 5y ago

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 just stop coming and live three or more hours of every day in the gym. The other guests were various degrees of horrified. His patients went from literally living on the street as heroin addicts to doing 3 hour gym sessions and holding down a job; and his peers thought he shouldn't be allowed to practice. 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.

frickenhamster 5y ago
Crabs in the bucket
mlyle 5y ago
> 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. 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."
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  > 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 meaningless?

bigmattystyles 5y ago

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

teucris 5y ago

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 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.

betwixthewires 5y ago
Well, you can call it a stopgap. As long as they're not saying "cured! It's over for you now." I think it is great. Why does the patient have to live through the debilitating symptom while the causes are worked on? Perhaps a part of the treatment then is getting the patient to leave the dryer at home on weekends, maybe initially curled up on the coffee table, then in the bathroom, etc. while they go to the grocery store or for a jog. It could be a very good first step. I have a compulsive problem that developed due to an anxious situation I was in. I was taking a nap on the couch, I smelled burning and assumed it was someone in my neighborhood grilling, which was common. I woke up to an apartment filled with smoke, my place was on fire. It was small, I was able to get out the front door (which is where the fire was) and call the fire department, they came and put it out, minimal damage, no loss of life. But still, since then, if I smelled wood burning, even though I know it's probably someone grilling or with a fire in the fireplace I go outside and look around just to be sure. It is irrational and I know while I'm doing it. What helped me was living in a place where some neighbor or other burns wood almost daily. I still get a tinge of "but what if that's not what it is this time" every time I smell it, but I don't compulsively check anymore. Also for a lot of people these mental illnesses cannot be cured, only managed. I'd think finding simple solutions to reduce compulsive anxiety are more sustainable than long term drug use.
- teucris 5y ago

betwixthewires 5y ago

Is 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.

spicybright 5y ago

This is very much paralleled with non-techies solving techie problems eloquently. A few weeks ago there was a story in a company where the financial department used pretty old computers that didn't run anyone else's software. They were the only ones that could use it. When asked, they said they were tired of the programmers mucking around with their machines so they just didn't use anything they knew. A knee jerk techie solution would probably be password login systems with someone holding the "keys" to it. Maybe some kind of other procedures. Or just do the above!

bullen 5y ago

I actually have a triple buffered solution for this on my stove and water pump in the summer house (which has dodgy electric wiring and home made plumbing): 1) Manual switch with a light when on. 2) Timer (runs max 60 minutes, makes some clicking noise when on) 3) Remote switch that I can turn off with my mobile phone from anywhere. That way if I forget to manually switch things off, I can turn the remote switch off and if that fails the stove and pump are powered maximum 60 minutes = wont burn the house down or flood it too much hopefully. In a future without insurance this is the only way to have a modern life without bringing the pump and stove with you! Xo By the way I don't think she had OCD, I think everyone else is reckless.

cowboysauce 5y ago

I've read most of Scott's blog posts and he rarely mentions OCD and when he does it tends to be "this is what I think people with OCD experience" and not "this is what my patients have told me" which leads me to believe that he is not an expert in OCD. I have OCD and it's ruined my life in ways that are hard to articulate. Which is why I can point out two good reasons why what's being described might not be a good idea. First, giving into compulsions just legitimizes them and reinforces the patterns that are central to OCD and can ultimately make things worse. Secondly, OCD has a habit of changing how it manifests. Sure, maybe the woman is no longer bothered by the hairdryer, but what happens when it becomes changes to worrying if the oven is on? She'll be right back where she started. I doubt that the anecdote actually happened as described. It's way too contrived, simplistic and borders on "Psychiatrists hate her! Cure your OCD with this one simple trick!". Realistically, OCD is incredibly insidious and if it were that simple to cure then nobody would have OCD. What's described is, at best, a short-term fix and half the psychiatrists likely knew that such things rarely stick. I've had the same thing happen to me more times than I can count. I think I found the silver bullet, a way to permanently defeat my obsessive thoughts. If I'm lucky then it'll last a week before my OCD comes back in full force. But the truth is that you cannot directly fight OCD, it's like squeezing dough. When you clamp down in one spot, it just squirts out somewhere else. There's a quote that I think describes it perfectly "To hate me is to give me breath, to fight me is to give me strength". Fighting OCD or giving into its demands is just falling into its traps. You only truly win when you reach a point where you don't respond to it.

caethan 5y ago
Scott has OCD. Search for "obsessive compulsive disorder" here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/11/going-loopy/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/11/going-loopy/
- cowboysauce 5y ago
  That's strange. My impression came from his article about the Chamber of Guf where he talks about pure OCD, but it sounds like he's only read about it and never actually met someone with it. I wonder if the disconnect is in taking the story in an idealistic way vs a practical way. Like sure, if you had someone for whom that works utterly when nothing else works then yeah, do that. But I don't think that's a realistic scenario.

Fleetfantasy 5y ago

As an OCD haver of over 20 years, I find these suggestions to be pretty wonderful. In some of cases, these conditions can't be fixed by therapy, and/or the drugs don't work. Therapy is fantastic, but sometimes these things can be the difference between getting out of bed in the morning & not. Finding these solutions can be absolute bliss - technology for 'hands-off' switching off things is one for me. As with everything it's a balance, but if something small helps in a big way, that's a win for me!

aspyct 5y ago

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!

JadeNB 5y ago
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.
- SamBam 5y ago
  I don't worry too much about whether I left the door locked or unlocked, but suck a system would produce anxiety in me, because I could never be sure if there wasn't some circuit malfunction and it wasn't showing me a false positive or negative. My wife and I had the exact same response to the baby wearables or gadgets that promised to tell us if our baby was still breathing up in her crib. We weren't worried about that, so the notion of adding something that would almost-certainly be a flaky indicator seemed guaranteed to increase anxiety.
  - aspyct 5y ago
    Spot on, mate!
- aspyct 5y ago
  Ahah, I absolutely did! And sibling commenter SamBam got it exactly right :D

legitster 5y ago

This story is cute, but my concern for calling it a treatment method is.. what is stopping the OCD from transferring to a new concern? Surely, it's not about the actual hair dryer. If they suddenly get concerned about leaving the heat on or the lamp plugged in they will quickly run out of room in the car.

tonyarkles 5y ago
You're right, but it could be enough of a workaround to help this person in the short-term to be able to spend the time long-term to better address the problem. For example, if they're completely distracted 10 minutes into therapy because the hair dryer might be on, it's going to be pretty difficult to actually engage.
renewiltord 5y ago
The way I see it is that if a server has run out of disk space, I first find the largest file, find the processes with that file open, truncate the file and restart them, and only then do I diagnose how I even ran into disk space issues. If I don't do that, I might lose uptime. This gives me head room.

ngvrnd 5y ago

SSC FTW

tibbydudeza 5y ago

In my case it is my remote garage doors. Sometimes worry that I did not press the button on the remote to close them when I left home so I would drive pass my home again after dropping off the kids at school. Fortunately distance to school/home/freeway to work is within a few minutes of each other. Later installed an IP camera - told the wife it was for home security and not monitoring the garage doors.

Markoff 5y ago
distance/door sensor would be probably cheaper (they cost like 5 dollars), though you would need to trust its reliability more than IP camera
- tibbydudeza 5y ago
  I think this was triggered when I came home one day and the garage door was open - suspect it was due to somebody using the same channel as me for theirs or I really forgot to close it. Replaced it with a rolling code controller board as a precaution to eliminate one possible cause.

P4u1 5y ago

That's amazing. Before I finished reading the article I thought one solution could be to throw the hair dryer away, and just use a towel or something(not ideal but beats being miserable I guess). But taking the hair dryer with her was way better.

swayvil 5y ago

If she suffered from an obsessive compulsion to review her case-notes in her head all waking hours, which made her into a better lawyer, we'd never even hear of this. Other useful forms of this "insanity" may be seen in engineers, scientists, writers... So UTILITY is definitely already the basis for any further judgment or antidote. We can say that. So taking the hairdryer with you is already entirely appropriate. An ideal of sanity is not our aim here. Never was. Never should be (unless that's your own personal thing).

cbmuser 5y ago

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.

fungiblecog 5y ago

Is this about mental illness or the stupidity of people? Literally the first thing I thought was "Just take the f**ng thing with you"

aazaa 5y ago

This quote is from a longer article. The specific comparison made there is how we relate to transgender people. > Imagine if we could give depressed people a much higher quality of life merely by giving them cheap natural hormones. I don’t think there’s a psychiatrist in the world who wouldn’t celebrate that as one of the biggest mental health advances in a generation. Imagine if we could ameliorate schizophrenia with one safe simple surgery, just snip snip you’re not schizophrenic anymore. Pretty sure that would win all of the Nobel prizes. Imagine that we could make a serious dent in bipolar disorder just by calling people different pronouns. I’m pretty sure the entire mental health field would join together in bludgeoning anybody who refused to do that. We would bludgeon them over the head with big books about the side effects of lithium. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-ma...

m463 5y ago

What's sort of disappointing is that many online games are capitalizing on these kinds of maladies. A friend worked for a company, and hoarding behavior is one of the things baked into the game. People collect things, and some people compulsively so. I would imagine "whales" might correlate with this.

mdavis6890 5y ago

Well if I got nothing else out of this HN discussion, I at least feel a whole lot better about all the crazy sh*t going on in my own head. Thanks!

emmelaich 5y ago

There was a tiny article / amusing note in the Reader's Digest a long time ago. A host was offended that the guest had brought a radiator with them - it was in the front passenger's seat in clear sight. The guest explained that it was the only way they knew to make sure that it was off. So, a somewhat old solution. But perhaps not so well-known.

teddyh 5y ago

Blog spam of https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-ma...

d136o 5y ago

would anyone agree that being a professional programmer encourages this type of OCD behavior? I enjoy getting lost in the code/algorithms/craft, but sometimes I'm afraid of going all in for fear it's not so healthy/balanced.

Gatsky 5y ago

This is the medical version of 'A Short Story for Engineers': https://userweb.cs.txstate.edu/~br02/cs1428/ShortStoryForEngineers.htm https://userweb.cs.txstate.edu/~br02/cs1428/ShortStoryForEng...

hidroto 5y ago
i hate that parable. they realy spent 8million and 20 dollars on a solution. would that worker have used a fan if the alarms were not there?

bipson 5y ago

Call me a "uneducated layman" but that advice was my very first impulse while reading the pain the patient is going through. Thankfully in psychiatry there is a push for "treating what is bothering you" against the Freudian "dig for the cause" - often patients are not served at all by the tedious and painful search for cause or roots of an itch, they just need a working remedy.

Markoff 5y ago

bringing the hair dryer with her was also my initial idea, other option getting completely rid off hair dryer would be other option

noduerme 5y ago

This is a great frickin story. I have pretty severe OCD and I treat myself this way. You basically can't have mercy with your own stupid terrors about objects if you have OCD. Taking the hair drier with you is brilliant. What the other shrinks should have noticed is that this is taking the power of agency away from the object and returning it to the owner. OCD people like me follow a certain thought process: 1. I need to do this [thing] or [something] bad will happen. 2. Nothing bad happened. I'm not wounded or dead. That was because I did [thing]. 3. If I hadn't switched the blender on and off 14 times today before I walked out the house, I might have walked out 30 seconds earlier and been hit by a bus. Therefore even as irrational as it seems, the wasted time on the blender was enough to keep me in the right timeline where I'm still alive and breathing. 4. Therefore whenever I get an irrational impulse to do something that might delay me, I should do it, because that's what keeps me on the timeline where I'm not hit by a bus. Just because none of this can be cured by someone speaking rationally to you and telling you you're insane, doesn't mean that it can or should be cured by mood-altering chemicals. The only answer for me has been demonstration to myself, i.e., I didn't slam the door six times but I didn't get cancer. etc. However, the biggest motivator was my ex-gf who used to wake up when I was folding my pants over and over, and go, WILL YOU FRIGGIN LAY DOWN? Last thought here. Drawing connections between what happens and what happened prior is a fine art, and one that's richly rewarded in the right corners of hackerdom. There's no shortage of people who lack the ability to see the most basic cause/effect and are willing to pay you to tease those things out of the data, or out of your ass. I consider OCD to be an asset, not a fault, as long as it can be channeled properly. It may have saved my life. BUT yeah about stupid shit like hair driers, just show people the obvious. Being OCD doesn't mean you're an idiot, and if you swallow the pill that says "I won't die because X" you open more doors to other rational thoughts. OCD is just your brain stuck in an if/then pattern. Several elses may cure a big chunk of it.

oxplot 5y ago

I was puzzled by the responses of therapists finding out about this. I guess as an engineer I’m always thinking of a quick practical solution. I would set up a camera where the dryer is. Taking the dryer itself is of course much better and simpler. What I find absolutely dumb is to skip these immediate remedies and instead trying to medicate someone off the bat. It’s like prescribing a healthy exercise regime for someone who’s having a heart attack.

peter_retief 5y ago

Is this actually true?

teekert 5y ago

Nice! I solve this for myself with smart plugs haha, I am otherwise a pretty normal person, but sometimes one must think in solutions, not problems. Get some sensors people, and learn about Home Assistant ;)

saul_goodman 5y ago

Reminds me of the old medical dialog: Person: "Dr, it hurts when I do this" Dr: "Well don't do that then"

alangibson 5y ago

You're either solving problems, or you're jerking off. In this particular case, for this particular problem, the intervention solved the problem. Nothing left to discuss.

hidroto 5y ago

it took me five minutes of reading these comments to realize we were talking about a hair dryer and not a colthes dryer.