Yeah, having this forums is of great help. I have really get a lot from here, apart for the medical/drugs info.
It´s a great relief to feel that I am not carrying this weight alone.
Particularly on hair-loss, I´ll never open myself about it to a friend. He´ll laugh or make a goddamn joke about it, or say the standard stupid rubbish "oh, it doesn´t really matter, no one cares!".
In my group of friends there´s a lot of mockery about hair-loss. I personally (you´ll understand why) feel very tense when they start with the jokes. Fortunately (for me) jokes are targeted to a friend of mine who is NW3-ish and shaves his head, universally known as "penis-head" since the very first day he shaved his funnily shaped dome, and some other friends who have clearly receeded. The bald ones also crack jokes about it openly. Sometimes I get some jokes too, but I don´t feel comfortable with them.
I guess that´s why I´m here. If I´ll be laughing with them I would have never come here in first instance, and I´ll never started a complete treatment.
If I talk with them about this, they´ll laugh and act like they don´t care, even if it´s a friend who is balding. And the next day they all would be like "Hey guys, listen to what Solo told me yesterday: He´s on a hair-loss regimen!!! OMG!! He is a freak, probably he´s mentally ill!!", "what is he using, powdered bat wings and the blood of a virgin??".
So, I keep it to my self. Sometimes I´m tempted to tell a friend who´s showing his first thinning about the big 3, but I shut up as a mofo, and I feel kind of guilty for not helping him. But I know that probably his reaction would be "What are you talking about?? there are no forces in universe that oppose to baldness!!".
And I do know for a fact that hair loss is affecting deeply to some of my friends. I´m very accurate at recognizing "har-loss behaviors" since I started reading the forums!!!. They go out not so frecuently, they try to avoid public exposure, they start to hit the gim, they look for serious relationships to have sex-chance locked for years...
And many of them haven´t thought of hair loss for a second in their lives when I started obssesing at 20. And now some of them are in a very bad shape, and being affected by it.
I´ve thought a thousands times about it, I could help them, but they´ll laugh just because they´ll never accept in front of me they are affected. And I´m afraid they´ll mock me about it.
So, there´s a lot about talking openly with my friends.
I did mentioned my treatments to my mom and girlfriends, and they were like "Oh, you don´t need it!!".
They are so adorable!!