My Life Has Been Ruined by an Anti-Baldness Drug
I’ve endured depression, anxiety, headaches, memory loss, insomnia, blurred vision, and impotence since I was 19
It sucks to be a teenager losing your hair. You start to notice your friends’ eyes darting up to your hairline. You become the butt of jokes. You feel marked out, as if the gene gods have tagged you as defective and old before your time.
I was 17 when I noticed the hair on my temples was receding. It was disconcerting but felt okay—until it didn’t feel okay. There came a point when there was just too much of my head showing, when my faithful hairstyle became tenuous. I felt that everyone, much to my unending embarrassment, must have noticed.
A girlfriend commented on it when I was 19. An American friend told me that my once full and floppy fringe had started looking wispy at 22. A girl who liked me was teased by a friend on Facebook because of my receding hairline and either didn’t know or didn’t care that I would read it. Six months later, it looked worse, and six months after that, worse still. Like most young men dealing with baldness, I was confronting a future image of myself that I really didn’t like.
By 2016, the World Health Organization had recorded that 59 men had killed themselves because…
