Maggies Hair Pulling Blog

After school I went to college, had a gap year and then went to Uni. During these years my hair pulling went up and down. I had the most amount of hair during my gap year, I went travelling and keeping busy and not being in a routine seems to help a lot with trich. 'Trich' is a nickname that people often use for Trichotillomania! By the time I left Uni my hair was quite bad! I still wore it up in a pony tail but you could see that it was really thin. Everyone knew that there was something wrong but I never spoke about it and avoided people's questions. At this time I was also in denial to myself that it was a real problem, I always thought that if I tried hard enough I could just stop....... I couldn't stop and so in January 2006 I decided to look for help. My first stop was the doctor!!! I had a discussion with the doctor but they didn't know of a cure. They suggested I try taking Prozac and go on the waiting list for some Behavioural Therapy, I went ahead and tr...

When I started Secondary School I had no hair at all. There was a small rat tail left but mum chopped it off with scissors. A few people mistook me for a boy but apart from that it didn't cause me too much trouble. I would have expected to be bullied but surprisingly I wasn't really. I think it was worse in Primary School, I remember someones dad once referring to me as the Bald Eagel ! By year 8 I had plenty of friends and my hair was growing back. I don't know why my hair improved in Secondary School, I guess I realised that looks were quite important and so tried hard to stop pulling. After a while my hair grew long enough to wear in a pony tail, this covered a few of the bald patches and made me feel a bit more normal. I continued to wear my hair in a pony tail (with plenty of hairspray) for the the next 13 years. I had to use hairspray to keep all the spiky new hairs from sticking up. Before I pulled it out, my hair was blonde and straight, but when the new hairs grew...

My hair story does drag on, there have been tears, tantrums, denial and fights. I have rowed with my family and hated myself. At the age of 9 my parents dragged me to the doctor because my hair was 'falling' out. It was all over the carpet and was getting noticeably thinner, I swore that I had no idea why it was falling out and was horrified when the truth finally came out. I tried to deny it but they knew!!! I did manage to keep the secret for quite a while, it wasn't until I got referred to a specialist that the truth came out. I remember that my parents had to pay for this 'specialist' and although I felt terribly guilty I just couldn't tell them that I was doing it to myself! In order to find out what the problem was he had to take hair samples which involved him pulling a few hairs from my head! I remember that this horrified me because I knew they wouldn't find anything wrong! Once my parents knew the truth the worry they previously had turned to ang...

I have a rather peculiar problem, since the age of about 9 I have been pulling out my hair . I call it a problem because I wish I didn't do it. The logical side of my brain tells me that it is wrong to pull my hair out but the 'confused' side of my brain tells me that I want to do it and that it feels nice. My conscious mind always sides with the logical part of my brain but the confused side always seems to win. Sometimes it feels like I have two little demons battling with each other. I want the bad one to go away but it won't. I am now 27 and really have had enough of this hair pulling nonsense! I pluck the hairs out of my head one by one and so far nothing positive has come from it. Hair pulling does actually have a proper name, Trichotillomania. But even with it's long and interesting sounding name I don't want it. So the point of this blog is to keep track the hairy part of my life, it might help me pull less and it might inspire others to keep their chi...