Before taking finasteride I had struggled with various emotional issues. This makes finding adequate help, sympathy, understanding or even a basic level of trust tricky for me because unless I can put other people inside my own mind it is impossible to articulate exactly HOW the drug has changed me and impacted my life in such an insidious and debilitating manner. It just sounds like whining, or complaining. But, in here, where people might be able to empathize and even relate on a personal level, I will attempt to put into words what has been naggling at me for so long.
I noticed my hair was thinning from the tender and young age of 14. My friends thought it was funny and would send me Bosley prescriptions as pranks in the mail in order to tease me, but it wasn’t until age 18 when I really analyzed my situation and thought I might have male pattern baldness. I saw a top dermatologist specializing in hair loss in New York, my home state, and he confirmed that I indeed was losing my hair and that it was both thinning and I had a receding hairline.
Needless to say, being the vain little self-absorbed teenager I was, I wanted to know any and all means to stem the rising tide of baldness. He told me there was a great drug his son was on called propecia, and that it would stop the hair loss and possibly even reverse it. He even drew me a little diagram of how DHT interacts with the body and how the drug binds to receptors and blocks the evil and hair-follicle destroying steroid.
A year and a half into treatment, when my dosage use was a lot more regular and I was committed to taking the drug, I noticed that I was having extreme difficulty in cognitive and academic areas in which I had once excelled. The words no longer came to me, my creativity felt stifled, and my anxiety and depression reached proportions they had never once before attained. But, my therapist and life coaches had advised me that looking up medication side effects was a lost cause and would only cause hypochondriasis, so I never linked how I was feeling to finasteride. I continued to take the drug for six months, in a period which I will now forever call the “point of no return.”
I have three major gripes with my situation:
- My doctor never once, in the entire two year course of the medication, explained to me or even mentioned that there were any side effecs
- My therapists maintain that this is a delusion and that I am fine and psyching myself out
- IF i had not followed the advice of my doctor and therapists, I might have made a full recovery before continuing the drug for 6 months after feeling severe mental and cognitive side effects
I want to preface the complaint of where I am now with a concession: I have not, and don’t think I will ever experience the libido side effects. I can still get an erection and am horny pretty much constantly. If there is any silver lining in the absolutely horrifying hellish scenario, that is it. But, I digress: finasteride has completely shocked me into a mental stupor and state of, for lack of a better word, “foginess.” I am a homosexual male who was in a healthy long distance relationship that turned sour during the latter course of my finasteride treatment. I would complain about the feleings I had, lack things to say, and overall be a whiny husk of a person with little to contribute. My ex doesn’t even understand now that what i’m going through is a legitimate and chemical imbalance in the brain, and believes that I am delusional and making this up for attention and pity. Furthermore, my energy is completely zapped. But the worst part is my mental state: I am in a constant dampened cognitive state. It feels as though I am always 40 feet below sea level, if sea level is alertness, in a thick haze from which my mind never clears up. I cannot maintain a train of thought or series of thoughts for more than 10 seconds (writing this has been an excercise in extreme patience), I forget almost everything whereas I used to have an IQ of 140 and could remember endless lists of band names, movies, and things I had interests in. I cannot socialize nearly as well because words and witty retorts do not come to me at all where they once used to. I get enjoyment out of nothing. I feel a constant physical panic and anxiety, like my body is laced with battery acid. This physical tenseness combined with cognitive stupor puts me in a state where I am too afraid to interact with others and too wired to get any sleep or rest. I am in a limbo of sorts, constantly worrying and also not thinking at all.
At the risk of sounding selfish, I just beg so badly that things will one day return to normal. Even 80% would be better than this utter lobotomy the drug has enacted on me.