I agree with you. This is not a normal response (unless he's joking):

>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. The stand-off was only broken when mother texted me to tell me to answer the phone. I hate telephones.

I have an anxiety disorder (GAD), so here's some personal anecdote...

My fear of phone is more among the line of "I might miss something _very_ important if I don't answer immediately." Unsolicited phone calls, and sometimes non-important phone calls make me very annoyed/angry to the point that sometimes I started yelling at caller over the phone. I know I shouldn't.

However, at the same time, I'm also scared of answering the phone from known or unknown callers since I _don't know_ what they're calling me for. Even such call is expected, I always assume they're to tell me a bad news. I'm fully aware it's absurd, but it's uncontrollable.

That sounds tough, sorry to hear that. Anxiety can be really difficult to deal with, even when you’re fully cognisant of it.

Please don't do internet psychiatric diagnosis on HN. Like accusations of astroturfing and shillage, it does far more harm than good, even accounting for the few cases where it might be right.

More elsewhere in thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15678214

Yeah, let's make diagnoses of people we don't know because of some blog post.

So how are you supposed to intelligently take in an article like this if you can't speculate on the causes of the trauma he reports? "Diagnosing" someone is by definition done by an expert. Having a suspicion as to the cause of something (even if that cause might be a mental disorder), is something regular people do, in order to make good decisions.

Because there are a lot of interesting topics in his blog post that can be discussed that have nothing to do with whether he has some disorder or not.

For example, I can actually pretty much relate to this guy's feelings about telephones. Is it also caused by me having some mental disorders?

The guy shared his personal issues in great detail. What's unfair about readers drawing some conclusions from it?

"Sounds to me" is a bit soft to come off as a diagnosis to me.

also mostly too much confidence in his negative emotions

Also the desire to regard himself as an otherwise confident person (even superior to the majority!) seems to be very strong:

> In many polls, people list their number one fear as “public speaking”, beating out “death” by some margin. Not me.

Perhaps for this reason the fear of talking to a stranger must be so strongly suppressed.

Personally, I also often feel uncomfortable when accepting a call from an unknown number, but I try to lean into the pain and pick up nevertheless. I actually think of my phone as something like a therapeutic device that allows me to practice talking to strangers and little by little the feeling of uncomfortableness will fade away...

I hate phones and I'm an extrovert. I've cold-called people, asking for money, aka fund raising. So I know too well why strangers are calling me. If I recognize the soliciting campaign, I'll text back "How much?" But I only pick up the phone if someone's in my contacts. If I'm in the mood.

Or maybe...a slight bit of hyperbole to make a point?