Dear papajohns,
Welcome to our forum! I am sorry that you have to go through this. As you can see when browsing the forum, we have many, many people here who can relate to your suffering and who have similar symptoms after taking Finasteride, Accutane or antidepressants. You are not alone!
Nothing in your post is pretentious or annoying. Far from it! Many of us used to have or still have the same thoughts, the same regret, the same anger about making such a mistake. The truth is, it is not our fault. While one can always do more research, our condition is not even generally accepted in the medical or scientific community. And we shouldn’t have to do extensive research in the first place when being prescribed with a drug against a comparatively trivial cosmetic problems like male pattern baldness. The blame is with the authorities that have and are still letting us down.
Fortunately, on this forum we also have a dedicated team that is working to create more awareness of this condition and to initiate more research into the underlying cause that will, hopefully, one day lead to potential treatment options. For this we need everyone’s help here.
Please consider participating in our community projects, which are presented here: Important Announcement: Two Community-Led Research Projects - Please Participate
The Survey takes around one hour of your time and can be saved on every step if you want to go through it in multiple sittings. The results will be very helpful to present systematic data with regard to the numerous symptoms that people in our community suffer from. Please also see here for more help: Have you signed up to take the post drug syndrome survey? This topic is for you
The 23andme project will cost about a 100 bucks, depending on location, and will provide genome data that may help us to find genetic similarities between patients that may predispose us for this condition. Needless to say, this would be very helpful.
Please also consider to report your adverse effects to the authorities to make them aware of the risks these drugs pose to the public. Country links can be found here: https://www.who.int/medicines/areas/quality_safety/regulation_legislation/list_mra_websites_nov2012.pdf
If you want to help raise awareness on social media, please volunteer in this thread: Are you interested in sharing your story for our Youtube project?
Welcome, thank you and good luck!