Confessions of a trichotillomaniac

I’m feeling the urge to blog again but now the surrey 100 is over I don’t have a ‘challenge’ to write about.

In the absence of a sporting challenge I feel strangely compelled to write about a daily challenge for me. I have to confess I’m a bit nervous about writing this entry as I’m afraid to say my daily battle is a mental health problem.

Yup I have just imagined at least half of you have shut down the computer and run away screaming.

Perhaps that is unfair, but when other people start talking about their mental health woes I feel like running away – and I’m certified nuts myself. But I guess it is for this reason I kinda want to write this. Mental health conditions are something that does have a huge stigma to it. It is hard to understand and it is a lot easier to think of people who suffer from it as different, weird, a bit broken and possibly best avoided. I think most people who read this know me, and hopefully like me, so coming from me it might not seem so alien. If I am open about my problems perhaps I will be doing my little bit for mental health awareness.

My particular brand of crazy (or at least the one this blog entry is about) is known as trichotillomania.

‘The specific DSM-5 criteria for trichotillomania (hair-pulling disorder) are as follows : Recurrent pulling out of one's hair, resulting in hair loss. Repeated attempts to decrease or stop the hair-pulling behavior.’

For me the hair pulling is thankfully mainly focused on my eyelashes but others pull at eyebrows and head hair. Most start as children, will probably be intermittently bald throughout their life and never fully recover.

Trichotillomania is fairly rare and little research has been conducted to discover the cause or create a working cure. It is almost tempting to think of it as exotic but the reality is far from glamorous. For the most part it just means I have a stockpile of unused Christmas mascara and an inability to see in the rain. Turns out eyelashes are really useful at keeping water out your eyes! In the shower I look like a mole dancing as I blindly negotiate washing my hair. I cannot swim at all without googles, even breast-stroke as the water will instantaneously get into my eyes. So next time you are stuck in the rain waiting for a bus at least you can marvel at how good you eyelashes are at keeping your eyes dry. It is true; you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.

My trichotillomania started in primary school. In fact my trichotillomania was inadvertently caused by the nutcracker. CURSE YOU NUTCRACKER. My family went to see it when I was a kid. I’m not much of a ballet fan myself so decided to pass the time playing with the little binocular things you get at the big theatres. I was blissfully unaware that these binoculars were a hive of bacteria and I was effectively having unprotected eye sex with the previous thirty thousand people who had used them since their last clean. Unaspiringly I got eye aids – otherwise known as conjunctivitis. I spent the next fortnight with disgustingly gloopy eyes. I distinctly remember having to pull the puss from my eyelashes in order to open my eyes in the morning as they had got stuck together. Inevitably some eyelashes were innocent casualties in the war on eye gloop.

I guess this must have started off the habit. At first I didn’t think there was anything wrong with it. I remember talking to a friend about it during art whilst we were drawing self-portraits. I told her I sometimes pulled my eyelashes out and she said she did too. Confirmed, it must be OK then. Little did I know that my friend was so insecure that she would have agreed with whatever I had said. Had I told her I kill people at the weekend I’m sure she would have said that she too was a serial killer. Never trust an 8 year old. So anyway my little habit grew stronger but no one really noticed. Kids do weird disgusting things all the time, it is impossible to notice them all.

The first memory I have of compulsive hair pulling was when I was struggling with my long division homework. Long division just doesn’t make sense. It never has and it never will. But when your 9 and you have been sat at your desk for an hour trying to make it make sense and it is getting late and if you don’t make it make sense soon you won’t have your homework done by tomorrow and your teacher will shout and you and everyone else in the class will know you haven’t done it and will think you are lazy or stupid… it gets a bit stressful. When my mum came over to check how I was doing she found that the centre of my work book was full of long black eyelashes. Balled patches had appeared on my eyes which were red and sore from pulling. I distinctly remember her shock ‘What have you done!’ and the shame that followed. I learnt then that my little habit was a bad, ugly and shameful habit.

In the weeks that followed it only got worse. The more my family tried to stop me and tell me off for hair pulling the worse I felt and the worse it got. I was painfully embarrassed by it. I remember trying to make up lies to cover what I had done – ‘I woke up and they fell out’. I never have been very good at lying. I remember it hurt, it really hurt when I pulled out an eyelash, but this just made me want to pull another one. A bit like poking your tongue into the hole when a tooth is removed or poking at a bruise after a fall. It didn’t take long before my eyes were entirely bald.

Over the next few years things went from bad to worse. I started to badly suffer from anxiety. At first this just made me a bit withdrawn but eventually I had such bad panic attacks that I became house bound. I was depressed. I would go days without eating and the thought of food made me panic. Missing some eyelashes were the least of my worries. Eventually at fourteen, I was taken to a psychiatrist that took me seriously. At the time the general consensus seemed to be that children could not suffer mental health problems so I saw at least three doctors who told my mother I was just being difficult. It was this psychiatrist who diagnosed me with trichotillomania amongst other things. The other things took precedence for treatment as they were stopping me from functioning so we never really addressed trichotillomania in the sessions. After a course of anti-depressants, therapy and a change in school and lifestyle (Mr T arrived), I learnt how to manage my anxiety and eat food again. The anti-depressants also seemed to stop my trichotillomania.

I think I stopped pulling entirely from the age of 16 until 20 but close friends tell me otherwise. Apparently I pulled my eyelashes out over my A Levels, and during a break up at university, but these must have been small blips as I don’t remember getting balled from them. I wish, I really wish, I knew why I didn’t pull during this time. I don’t think I was any happier than I am now. In fact I think I am happier now then I was then. I wasn’t taking any medication; I stopped the anti-depressants when I was 16. I was a lot drunker, in fact I’m fairly confident that from 18 to 20 I was almost permanently drunk. Perhaps copious amounts of vodka cure trichotillomania? I should publish my findings, it would be the first known cue! Alas copious amounts of vodka do not get you a degree so in my final year I decided to sober up… for at least half of my waking hours and get my head down so I passed the degree. And I guess it was here, once more at my desk desperately trying to understand a problem in front of me – except this time long division is replaced by some unfathomable cognitive neuroscience paper with a hangover to boot - that the compulsive hair pulling started again.

My eyelashes have been weakened from years of pulling. It used to be quite hard to pull out the beautiful long black eyelashes I had as a child. But as an adult I now have weak brittle thin eyelashes that fall out as soon as you look at them. In an hour I can pull out a section as wide as my finger. Plucking them mercilessly one by one until there is nothing left. It doesn’t really hurt anymore. Just a pleasant tug and tingle as the hair pops out. When I get compulsive it is a real need. I feel agitated, my hands almost itch for wanting to pick. My throat feels tight, constricted by my want to pick. I find it almost impossible to stop my hands from touching my face. I run my thumb across my eyelid to find a stump. Once I find one I cannot stop thinking about it. It almost becomes like a splinter in my eye, I just need to get it out. On bad days my first waking thought it pulling out my eyelashes and it is constant through the whole day until I go to sleep. Unless I see Mr T that is. Any time with Mr T is downtime and I have no desire to pull when I am around him. which is both lovely and strange. When I’m pulling I go into a trance like state. It is not really relaxing as such, but I feel a calm detachment from the world. With the stress of my final year it took no time at all for me to go balled.

And then I had the dilemma about what to tell my friends. At school I had ridiculously low self-esteem so talking about my eyelashes was just too painful to imagine. I also almost never went to school or talked to people so it was surprisingly easy to avoid the subject. My best friend clearly had trichotillomania as well, evidence by the balled patch on her head but we never once spoke about it. We just couldn’t, it was too shameful. In fact we still have never talked about it! Seems like a bit of an opportunity wasted now because it would have probably been helpful to share our experiences but hindsight gets you know where.

All that vodka had made me very talkative at university. I was blessed with many friends and even more acquaintances (that unfortunately I can never remember due to vodka but I chat to them anyway because it is too embarrassing to admit I literally cannot remember anything about them). The eyelash thing is bound to come up.

… but it didn’t. Hurray for being fair and too lazy to wear makeup on a daily basis. People didn’t notice, or at least if they did they never said anything. To me, every time I look at a mirror I see it. Every photo of me I see it. But I guess I’m very aware of the picking and all of its negative connotations. To an onlooker I probably just look a bit washed out. Funny thing was I was almost disappointed no one brought it up. I think I was ready to talk about it now, and almost wanted people to ask. Eventually I just started telling my friends about it. They were all slightly bemused but very good about it. The huge burden of shame I used to carry around as a child had dwindled to mild embarrassment. It is not something I’m ever going to feel proud about, but I can now tell strangers about it. A wise, and fairly troubled, person once sung ‘ridicule is nothing to be scared of’. It is amazing how much courage that brings me on a daily basis.

And so there you have it. Confessions of a trichotillomaniac. I still pull. I don’t know how to stop. I’ve had a crack at many interventions: gloves, sellotape on hands, thinking putty, glasses, goggles, a picking diary, a picking log, cutting my nails painfully short, growing my nails impractically long, asking colleagues and friends to shame me, wearing fake eyelashes. Bizarrely when I put the eyelashes on I don’t feel the need to touch my eyes, but instead I find myself picking the skin off my arms so I don’t think I’m really making progress. Nothing seems to stop me. I would love to stop but I’ve almost made peace with myself over it. Who needs to see in the rain anyway?

For another perspective on trichotillomania check out Becky’s blog (which may have inspired this blog post) on U Tube:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=UU61riJ9dHUNKhedeejZfXAg

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