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Alejandro1 comments on Rationality Quotes December 2013 - Less Wrong
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--Fred Clark
That's a great way to make them lose their trust in medical professionals indefinitely. It's probably not a good idea to reinforce their delusions, either.
Fair point, and I don't mean to endorse the quote as psychiatric advice (nor do I believe the quote was intended as such). I took is as an amusing expression of a general principle, that people with deluded beliefs may be quite rational in following the consequences of those beliefs, which should be taken into account when dealing with them.
I didn't think you endorsed it, but if an analogy is problematic, then the principle it's trying to express might be too.
Is the point to keep them from injuring themselves while trying to break the walls down?
The quote in its original context:
— Wilson and Shea, Illuminatus!
Doesn't this only allow 'patients' who correctly think they have superpowers to escape? How is this a net improvement in holding only patients who are actually insane?
A patient who believes they are Samson inaccurately believes they have a weakness: their hair being cut. By cutting their hair, you trigger their imaginary weakness, which decreases the amount that they resist, and thus you do not have to pin them down with orderlies.
On the other hand, a patient who believes they are Samson may resist having their hair cut quite forcefully, at least if you do it while they're conscious. A non-superpowered individual struggling to prevent someone from wielding scissors about their head may be quite a bit more of a liability than a non-superpowered individual struggling against facilities built to contain crazy people.
And... problem solved! Whew, that was easy.
(Also, why scissors, and not an electric razor? Way safer for everyone involved.)
If I were going to cut the hair of a patient who believed they were Samson, I would definitely want to do it when they were sedated, but then, a patient who believed they were Samson who had their hair cut in their sleep might be highly aggrieved and become aggressive in response.
(Keep in mind that the biblical Samson physically destroyed the building in which he was being contained, at the cost of his own life, when he entreated God to return his strength for a final act of vengeance after he was betrayed and had his hair cut.)
Actually, his hair had regrown at that point- his captors thought that he was powerless because they had blinded him after Delilah delivered him to them, and apparently Delilah never told them the real secret to his strength.
His hair had regrown, but he still had to pray to God to restore his lost strength, because cutting it at all broke his vows as a Nazirite.
Think of PCP-driven berserkers flipping cars with their mere, ordinary human strength, fully unleashed without regard to injury or death, and you've got some notion of the problem posed by a delusional man who thinks he's Samson.
Do you have evidence that car flipping really happens?
There is at least evidence that people who think they are Samson can tear out the bars of their windows to escape a mental ward.
That evidence seems to be hearsay, so really weak. Must have been weak bars too.
Presumably in the same spirit, when treating mental patients who think they're Superman, expose them to glowing yellow rocks. That said, does this sort of thing actually work in real life?
Reinforcing their beliefs might work for making them even more insane.
Honestly, it would surprise me if either of those strategies worked (or failed) as one might naively expect, since I mostly expect pathological delusions to involve some seriously atypical connections between observations and conclusions. But I bet there's people on LW with experience in the field, or at least who have read up on case studies.
I used to have a wrestling coach that used the very un-PC term "retard strength" to refer to the ability of an opponent to apply lots of force from angles you wouldn't think they could a priori (as a compliment, not a slur).