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?
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
