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Comment by albertgoeswoof | Hacker News Reader

Unsolicited or unexpected phone calls are annoying, but this guy has an anxiety disorder and should probably attend CBT or psychotherapy as it is obviously significantly impacting his life in a negative way.

Also, text is not always a the best way of communicating- a lot of information is conveyed in someone’s voice which is often difficult to put on paper. It can also be way faster to speak to someone, particularly where a problem is a little complex and requires information to be exchanged between both parties multiple times.

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Have you considered not diagnosing mental illnesses in HN comments? Let alone offering "treatment advice" on a case you know nothing about, without having spoken to the person in question?

He spent the best part of a day compiling a spreadsheet of possible answers to a conversation, the wrote a lengthy blog post telling us about it. That is not normal.

Quit categorizing people into normal and not normal. It's not normal.

It’s not healthy would be a better assessment

That's actually pretty damn "normal". A shame. But pretty "normal"/common.

I have to agree. But I couldn't help myself.

Sure it's normal for people to make an assessment on other people. Some of those people fall outside the bell curve.

The middle of the bell curve for a particular trait (e.g. talking on the telephone) is normal - so about 90% of the population.

You want to redefine the word normal. OK, sure. What should I use? Different? Strange? Unique? Flower? Snowflake? I don't know. Sounds pretty odd behaviour to me. Not wrong, not bad, not dirty. Just weird. Odd. Not normal.

Have you done/read any studies on people's telephone behaviour? No? Then how can you speculate about what does and doesn't fall within 2 standard deviations of the mean?

Pray tell, why isn't that normal? And why are you qualified to decide what is, or isn't, normal?

If his response was normal there would be no telephones because no one would use them. Hence he is not normal, he is unusual. Different.

I get to decide because i am human and humans make assessments about things and people.

> Recently, when I was at mum’s alone, the house phone rang. I didn’t answer it. It rang again immediately. I didn’t answer it. It rang again immediately. I stood over it, willing it to stop, palms sweating.

Sweating palms is a fear response. It's adrenaline and fight / flight. It's pathological, it interferes with his day to day life, and he deserves safe effective evidence based treatment.

Yes this isn’t the place for diagnoses, merely speculation and advice. That said, I am certain that if he repeated his post verbatim or in summary to his GP they would refer him to a therapy service.

Its ironic that his anxiety prevents him from getting diagnosed / treated for it. Probably quite common in mental health.

The lack of information in voice is sometimes a boon. If I am annoyed, I can nevertheless always write perfectly politely, but I cannot always keep the annoyance out of my voice.

I agree. I loathe telephones, I also dislike speaking in public, and to people. None the less, I find the inflection, tone, rate of speech all add to meaningful communication. I hate my own voice, so I dislike speaking, but if I find comfort with whom I am speaking, I find it pleasurable, and perhaps more informative than else. It is the human level of it.

Most of the time I'm with you, but it works both ways.

I accidentally started a fight on HN by typing the exact opposite of my views, or at least something that could apparently be interpreted that way. I don't think I would have been misunderstood in the same manner in speech.

In speech your voice determines your tone. In text your reader determines your tone.

Internet psychiatric diagnosis is not ok in HN comments. As a trope it is perhaps second only to you're-the-shill-no-you're-the-shill in the degradation it causes to discussion. And consider that the author posted this, so you're talking about someone in the room.

I'm sure you didn't mean it that way, but it's still something we all need to have the discipline and good taste to avoid. If we have to we'll add it to https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, but I'd rather avoid having a laundry list of verbotens.

It seems a shame that someone with a very treatable mental health problem should continue to suffer a limited life just because we're all too polite to say "have you thought about CBT?"

I do wonder what you'd say if someone described a physical health problem and people suggested they go see a physical health doctor.

You're making a series of assumptions here: that the problem can be accurately assessed this way, that the commenter is qualified to do so, that a message board comment is a suitable medium for such a message, and that the noise of this being an internet argument trope wouldn't drown out the signal of human concern. That's a lot of slack to cut "this guy has an anxiety disorder".

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