Word: trichotillomania
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...findings bear out, they may herald a potential new treatment for an age-old condition. As psychiatric symptoms go, hair-pulling is among the earliest recorded. According to Dr. Jon Grant, a trichotillomania expert at the University of Minnesota School of Medicine and the lead author of the new paper, Hippocrates himself said that in order to test whether patients were faking their illness, doctors must ask whether they are pulling out their hair. The behavior is so commonly associated with distress that the stock phrase to describe a stressful situation is that it causes you to tear your hair...
...seem wired to attack our hair under traumatic conditions, possibly because forcibly extracting hair is painful; it can divert attention from stress to the more immediate matter of how to solve a pressing problem. For chronic hair pullers, that diversion turns into addictive psychological relief. Some people with trichotillomania pull out hairs not only from their heads but also from their pubic areas and armpits; as many as 20% eat their hair; a small minority pull other people's hairs. "Many say it's not painful but more of a sense of just a tug, one that provides a calming...
Grant theorizes that trichotillomania may be a kind of grooming irregularity that falls into the obsessive-compulsive family of disorders. "Some parrots pull out all their feathers," he says. "Some mice pull out all their...
Likewise, in Grant's 12-week study, those compulsive hair pullers who were randomly assigned to receive 1,200 to 2,400 milligrams of N-acetylcysteine a day experienced a 40% reduction in scores on a test designed to measure trichotillomania. Unfortunately the patients did not report a substantial improvement in quality of life, but Grant believes that may be because three months is too soon for unsightly bald spots to have grown back...
Currently, most patients with trichotillomania are treated with psychotherapy or antidepressants, including selective serotonin-reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), like Prozac. But in recent years, four studies that looked at SSRIs in the treatment of trichotillomania showed they are not effective in relieving the condition. (Indeed, there is an emerging debate about the limitations of SSRIs, which received enormous media exposure in the '90s and have become the go-to drug to treat not only depression but, with varying success, anxiety, nicotine addiction, body-image problems, bipolar disorder, psychosis and a host of other mental disorders.) While there's been less research...