Trichotillomania
Trichotillomania (TTM) is an impulse disorder that causes drives people to pull out the hair from their head, eyelashes, eyebrows, or other parts of the body, resulting in obvious bald surfaces. It is currently defined defined as an impulse-control disorder, but there are still questions about how it should be classified. It may appear to be, at times, to resemble a fixation, an addiction, a tic disorder or an obsessive-compulsive disorder. It is approximated to affect one to two percent of the populace, or four to eleven million Americans.
Who Gets Trichotillomania?
Trichotillomania seems to occur most frequently in the pre or early juvenile years. The normal first-time hair puller tends to be 12 years old, granted TTM has inflicted people as young as one and as mature as seventy. It is a common belief that ninety percent of those with Trichotillomania are women, but research is open to doubt and it could be that men are less likely to look for treatment and can more easily hide their symptoms. A form of TTM that affects very young children presents itself in males and females at the same rate and seems to be more harmless in nature.
How Do I Know If I Have Trichotillomania?
Although the symptoms span greatly in severity, placement on the body, and response to treatment, most people with Trichotillomania pull enough hair over a long enough period of time that they have stark spots on their heads (or lacking eyelashes, eyebrows, pubic, or underarm hair), which they go to great extremes to disguise with hairstyles, scarves, clothing, or makeup. The determination of the impulse can vary considerably: For some people, at some times, it is mild and can be overcame with a bit of extra awareness and concentration. For others, at times, the compulsion may be so strong that it makes concentrating on anything else close to impossible.
Why Doesn’t Anyone Seem to Know about Trichotillomania?
Trichotillomania did not arise in the popular media in the United States until sometime near 1989. As a consequence, many people with Trichotillomania have gone for a number of years without adequate education about their condition, or basic treatment. Naturally, the one symptom that most people with Trichotillomania experience is indignity.
