another cause – trichotillomania
Ok guys, I’m back with another cause of hair loss that I haven’t yet mentioned. It’s trichotillomania. It’s commonly referred to as trich, and that’s also easier to type.
This type of hair loss is slightly different. It’s different because it’s self-inflicted. Trich is defined as obsessive pulling of the hair, until it breaks or until you pull it out of your head. I know a lot of people can’t understand this. It’s also not very comfortable to admit that this is the reason I know about the psychological effects of hair loss.
I started pulling my hair because the texture of hair intrigued me. I have super curly hair and curly hair seems to have a different feel. Mine had a textured feel to it. Curly hair also tends to have more split ends for some reason so I began a mission to eradicate the split ends manually with my fingers and my teeth. It may sound crazy but it is what it is.
The split end mission gradually evolved to searching out and finding the strange textured strands and then pulling them out. This was a nice feeling. It was soothing to find the strange strands and then pull them out. A lot of people ask me if pulling hair out of your scalp hurts. Maybe it hurts some people but it never bothered me.
Anyway, I would do this in the car, at work, in meetings, pretty much everywhere. It was just soothing. Well, I started to notice a problem on the right side of my head. My hair was shorter on that side than on the other. So I switched the area I pulled from. I switched to the left side. This let me keep pulling without addressing it.
Now you should know that I did feel terrible that I’d ruined the right side of my hair. It was completely ridiculous to try to style it. I didn’t stop though. It’s a shame. I’ll skip ahead to saying that I did not stop until I started to realize exactly how thin my hair was. I used to have a full head of thick hair. My hair is probably 1/3 the volume of what it used to be.
There are a lot of factors that play out with trich. There are other tendencies that also seem to be present with those who suffer with the urge to pull. It is a strong desire. I get a lot of questions about it so I’ll follow up on those soon in a future post.