Therapeutic interventions which reduce shame and enhance your ability to accept distressing internal experiences may be important in clinical approaches to adolescent hairpulling.

These results suggest that negative self-evaluation plays a crucial role in maintaining hairpulling and co-occurring symptoms.

We also found high levels of trance-pulling and post-pulling rituals.

Shame partly explained the relationship between hairpulling severity and depression symptoms and fully explained the relationship between hairpulling severity and anxiety symptoms.

We found that hairpulling severity was significantly associated with experiences of shame, and that shame in turn significantly predicted both depression and anxiety symptoms.

This study was with a community sample of adolescents with clinical levels of hair-pulling severity.

Despite adolescence being a critical age for the emergence of hair-pulling disorder (trichotillomania) and co-occurring symptoms, there are huge gaps in our understanding of the features of hair-pulling, what causes and keeps it going.

New paper with @claremackay.bsky.social led by MSc student Talia Mayerson on the role of shame in the adolescent hairpulling and co-occurring anxiety and depressive symptomology: acamh.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/....
Summary below:

Hairpulling, skin picking and nail biting are common but misunderstood. Pls watch and share this brilliant video by @claremackay.bsky.social explaining 6 things we should know about body-focused repetitive behaviours (BFRBs): youtu.be/Rkc-vpXJ8Bw?...

Thanks Maria and well done to @amymccall.bsky.social - so exciting to see her study published!

A huge congratulation to our DPhil student @amymccall.bsky.social who has just won the #MRC Max Perutz Award recognising outstanding science communication from MRC PhD students for her brilliant video on her work researching panic disorder in young people: www.youtube.com/shorts/DK0xg...

Thanks @thementalelf.bsky.social great to be here and looking forward to seeing all the BFRB videos from the conference :)

Yes please!

Yes please!

Thanks @lucyfoulkes.bsky.social - it's great to be here :)

#HiSciSky I'm a clinical psychologist at Oxford Uni interested in adolescent anxiety disorders, OCD and Body-Focused Repetitive Behaviours.