Young children, more often girls, begin by playing with the hair on their heads in situations of stress, anxiety, frustration or boredom. The hair playing then escalates to hair pulling where hair is pulled out strand by strand, resulting in baldness and emotional trauma.
Research has indicated a connection between trauma and Trichotillomania. Eighty-five adults with Trichotillomania provided self-report data. Those with self-reported traumatic events had greater global hair pulling severity. Trauma correlated with depression, experiential avoidance, and quality of life.
Trichotillomania can be related to emotions: Negative emotions. For many people with trichotillomania, hair pulling is a way of dealing with negative or uncomfortable feelings, such as stress, anxiety, tension, boredom, loneliness, fatigue or frustration.
Pulling out your own hair is one example of a harmful coping mechanism in response to stress. So let's look at the deeper causes of why you pull out your hair? This is one of several body-focused repetitive behaviors that may be observed in people who are struggling with a form of OCD or body dysmorphia.
We can conclude that trauma may play a role in development of both trichotillomania and skin picking. Increased duration of trichotillomania or skin picking was correlated with decreased presence of post-traumatic stress symptoms.
Trichotillomania. This condition is an impulse control disorder caused by anxiety or stress. Often called “hair-pulling disorder,” people with trichotillomania have the irresistible urge to pull out their own hair, eyelashes or eyebrows.
Trauma in childhood such as physical or sexual abuse, loss of a loved one, or any emotional upheaval such as divorce could cause a young child or even an older one to begin pulling out their hair.
Trichotillomania (often abbreviated as TTM) is a mental health disorder where a person compulsively pulls out or breaks their own hair. This condition falls under the classification of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).
Trichotillomania is an independent diagnosis but is highly comorbid, meaning it frequently occurs with other conditions. Anxiety and depression are the most common comorbidities, followed by ADHD.
While people on the autistic spectrum often have comorbid trichotillomania and other BFRBs, the reverse correlation does not appear to hold true, and no scientific evidence could be found indicating that autism causes trichotillomania.
Trichotillomania is on the obsessive-compulsive spectrum, which means that it shares many symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), such as compulsive counting, checking, or washing.
A study conducted in 2002 revealed a connection between trichotillomania and the individuals who experienced childhood trauma, or emotional neglect. This study shows that the people who suffer from trichotillomania were having higher levels of childhood trauma.
Each time the person pulls hair, the brain releases a small burst of reward hormone. The person feels 'rewarded' with a brief sense of relief.
'Studies have shown that people who have dealt with traumatic experiences in the past are more likely to deal with hair loss issues like alopecia areata in the future.
In people with trichotillomania, brain imaging studies have shown abnormalities in activity in certain regions of the brain, including areas involved in regulating impulses and habits, emotional processing, and reward processing. Neuroimaging research also points to abnormal activity in those with OCD.
Vitamin D deficiency has been correlated with non-scarring alopecia including alopecia areata or female pattern hair loss. It was theorized that hair loss secondary to vitamin D deficiency in patients susceptible to trichotillomania may exacerbate this obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Trichotillomania has also been linked to impulsive behavior and sensation seeking, which are both often present in substance use disorders. Trichotillomania itself has been considered a form of addiction, as those with trichotillomania may experience withdrawal or difficulty stopping hair-pulling behaviors.
Compulsive hair pulling or Trichotillomania, is an impulse control behaviour that is categorised under Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and Related Disorders (OCD-R) in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM5).
It could be: your way of dealing with stress or anxiety. a chemical imbalance in the brain, similar to obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) changes in hormone levels during puberty.
Last year Amy Schumer openly shared the struggles that she has had with hair pulling or trichotillomania (TTM) since she was a child. "When I was 13, I pulled out so much hair that I needed to get a wig and wear a wig to school," she told Howard Stern.
Brain imaging showed “significantly increased cortical thickness in a right frontal cluster.” This region of the brain is involved in suppression of inappropriate motor responses.
It is commonly seen in depression and many other psychiatric disorders. Trichotillomania rarely occurs as a co morbid condition in patients with schizophrenia. Even rarer is recurrent hair pulling in response to psychotic symptoms in schizophrenia.
The condition is more common in children ages 9–13 years than other age brackets. Older adolescents and teens with trichotillomania often experience increasingly severe symptoms the longer the condition is present.