By Angela Hartlin Along with the rest of the world, Canadians have been experiencing the devastations caused by the COVID-19 crisis. With access to effective treatments for trichotillomania (compulsive hair pulling), excoriation disorder (skin picking disorder), and other body-focused...
When you have a body-focused repetitive behaviour (BFRB), it can feel all encompassing. It can consume your time, make home in every thought, and shape the way you go about life. It can be the lens that you see...
CBSN Does Mindfest 2020 Last week, the Canadian BFRB Support Network had the privilege of having a table at Mindfest, an annual mental health fair hosted at University of Toronto’s Hart House. Our greatest takeaway from this year’s...
Those who celebrate Christmas often have a wish list of gifts they would like to receive. Sure, it might seem like something a child will do to prep for Santa, but many teens and adults also have a list...
Why do we stop sometimes without even trying? This is a question that I ask myself a lot. I have been pulling my hair for 18 years and biting my nails for basically my whole life (30 years). While...
Makeup tips from Danielle Roberts. Danielle is CBSN’s Peer Support Coordinator and a skin picker. I love makeup. Or rather, I should say that I have a Stockholm syndrome relationship with makeup. At 19, I was held hostage by...
Inspired by a blog on The Mighty about things the blogger wished she had been told about mental illness, I thought let’s delve into what we wished we had been told about body-focused repetitive behaviours (BFRBs), starting with dermatillomania....
It’s becoming more and more evident to me that there’s a stark divide between two different philosophies when it comes to body-focused repetitive behaviours. One the one side of things, we have community members who strive to be behaviour-free....
Something that I’ve been working on behind the scenes for the past week or so is getting in touch with The Mighty and seeing about us partnering with them. And guess what? It’s happened! I’m thrilled to share with...
I hope this blog, the first after a long period of silence, doesn’t come across too awfully, but there’s something that bugs me about the community. It’s a bit of a rant, I guess you could say. “Am I...
All of us in the BFRB community seem to consider making that monumental Facebook post. It seems to feel like our tell-all novel of our BFRB(s) in post form, where we say I have trichotillomania, dermatillomania, onychophagia, dermatophagia, trichotemnomania...
Scars are strange things. Not necessarily in how they biologically exist, but more so in how they’re treated. I, for instance, have a few different kinds of scars. Dermatillomania scars, of course, but I also have a dog bite...
College is a journey, where you’re supposed to find yourself. By the end of my freshman year the journey I found myself on was not one I particularly enjoyed. This is thanks to trichotillomania. The transition and adjustment to...
My name is Gessie and I am 16 years old from the United States. I have trichotillomania. I recently had to write an autobiography for English class, and one of the sections we had to include was about a...
For over 2 decades I have suffered from Trichotillomania. Trichotillomania; chronic, impulsive and addictive hair pulling resulting in noticeable hair loss. In and around 1994 I started pulling my hair out. I didn’t think anything of it. It did...