The Hair Dryer Incident (2014)
I&#x27;ve read most of Scott&#x27;s blog posts and he rarely mentions OCD and when he does it tends to be &quot;this is what I think people with OCD experience&quot; and not &quot;this is what my patients have told me&quot; which leads me to believe that he is not an expert in OCD.<p>I have OCD and it&#x27;s ruined my life in ways that are hard to articulate. Which is why I can point out two good reasons why what&#x27;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&#x27;ll be right back where she started.<p>I doubt that the anecdote actually happened as described. It&#x27;s way too contrived, simplistic and borders on &quot;Psychiatrists hate her! Cure your OCD with this one simple trick!&quot;. Realistically, OCD is incredibly insidious and if it were that simple to cure then nobody would have OCD. What&#x27;s described is, at best, a short-term fix and half the psychiatrists likely knew that such things rarely stick.<p>I&#x27;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&#x27;m lucky then it&#x27;ll last a week before my OCD comes back in full force. But the truth is that you cannot directly fight OCD, it&#x27;s like squeezing dough. When you clamp down in one spot, it just squirts out somewhere else. There&#x27;s a quote that I think describes it perfectly &quot;To hate me is to give me breath, to fight me is to give me strength&quot;. 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&#x27;t respond to it.