Trichotillomania Support in Utah

People who pull find help from many kinds of practitioners: psychologists, counselors, psychotherapists, CBT therapists, hypnotherapists, EFT practitioners, NLP practitioners and coaches. Different people find different things helpful. Many try more than one kind of support over time.

If you’d like to check a clinician’s license, Utah keeps one register for most of them. The Division of Professional Licensing covers psychologists, clinical mental health counselors, clinical social workers and marriage and family therapists. Its license lookup ↗ is free to search by name. Many other kinds of help, like hypnotherapy, EFT and coaching, aren’t licensed by the state. They have their own professional associations instead.

Utah has no charity or group just for hair pulling or skin picking. These organizations can still help, and most work statewide or online.

We haven’t found a regular in-person trichotillomania group in Utah yet. Most Utahns who pull connect online.

• IOCDF hair pulling support groups: the IOCDF’s Find Help directory ↗ lists groups for people who pull, many meeting by video.
• My BFRB on HealthUnlocked: a free online community for people with BFRBs, linked from the IOCDF’s BFRB pages. You can post without using your real name.
• NAMI Utah Connection groups: free, peer-led groups for adults with any mental health condition. You don’t need a diagnosis. Groups meet in Salt Lake City and online.

For parents: watching your child pull is its own kind of hard. The Parent’s Guide to Trichotillomania helps you understand what your child is going through.

Do you run a Utah group? Tell us and we’ll list it for free.

Hair pulling has been written about for centuries. It got its medical name in 1889. A French skin doctor, François Henri Hallopeau, described a young man who pulled out hair all over his body. Hallopeau called it trichotillomania, from the Greek words for hair, to pull, and madness.

That last part of the name has aged badly. Hair pulling has nothing to do with madness. It’s a condition that many ordinary, capable people live with, often in secret.

For most of the next century, hair pulling was seen as rare. That began to change in the late 1980s, when researchers found it was far more common than anyone had thought. In 1987 it entered the US manual that mental health professionals use to describe conditions. Today it sits in the DSM-5 and ICD-10 (F63.3) as a body-focused repetitive behavior. It sits alongside related conditions like skin picking.

Being named matters. A name tells you that what you do has been seen before, many times. Many people say learning the word “trichotillomania” was the first time they felt less alone.

It usually starts around ages 10 to 13, though it can begin at any age. It isn’t a bad habit, attention-seeking, self-harm or a lack of willpower. It’s a real condition, and you’re far from the only one living with it.