How does the hair-loss drug finasteride work? Can it affect my mental health?
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For many men the gradual thinning of hair is about more than just their appearance. Finasteride, a drug widely prescribed for the treatment of male pattern baldness has been used effectively for many years for this deeply personal problem.
Yet, behind its use are growing concerns about its link to the development of depression, anxiety, and even suicidal thoughts.
There is now critical discussion among both users and health-care professionals about the potential hazards associated with its continued use.
So how does the drug work? And what does the evidence say about the risk of developing a mental health problem?
How does finasteride work?
Finasteride is used to treat androgenetic alopecia, also known as male pattern baldness. It works to regrow hair and prevent the further loss of hair.
One of the key causes of pattern baldness is the production of a hormone called dihydrotestosterone which the body makes from testosterone. When it binds to the follicles of hairs, it initiates a process called hair follicle miniaturisation. This is where the growth cycle of the hair becomes progressively shorter, resulting in thinner and weaker hair.
Finasteride works by blocking the enzyme that converts testosterone to dihydrotestosterone. By blocking the enzyme, dihydrotestosterone concentrations can be reduced by around 60โ70% for the majority of men.
Finasteride was first approved in the late 1990s as a prescription-only medicine and is taken as a daily 1 milligram oral tablet. Medications available at a higher 5 mg daily dose are not used for baldness, but as a treatment for non-cancerous prostate enlargement.
This medication is not indicated for women, even though they can also have this type of hair loss.
How can it impact your mental health?
Changes in mental health are not listed as an established side effect in Australian guidance given to health-care professionals.
Based on clinical trials, the most common effects include:
- decreased libido
- erectile dysfunction
- reduced semen production.
The guidance also describes an increased risk of prostate cancer and a potential risk for breast cancer. Yes, men can get breast cancer too.
While initial clinical trials conducted to obtain approval for the drug didnโt demonstrate mental health concerns, monitoring of patients using the drug has since indicated a potential increased risk of depression and suicidal thoughts. But as this is based on patients self-reporting symptoms, according to the guidance there is no definitive link.
However, in May 2025, the European Medicines Agency safety committee stated suicidal thoughts was a confirmed side effect of finasteride. The European Union also advises patients that finasteride can cause a depressed mood and depression.
Similarly, in a warning about compounded finasteride, the United States Food and Drug Administration stated in April 2025 that topical formulations of the drug has similar side effects to the oral version. These include depression, anxiety and suicidal thoughts.
What should you do if it is affecting your mental health?
If you notice changes in your mental health while taking the drug, try not to handle significant mood changes by yourself. If youโre feeling unusually low, anxious or emotionally unstable, check in with a doctor so they can help you figure out whether finasteride is contributing to your mood and what support you may need.
If the symptoms are mild, they may suggest pausing finasteride to see whether things improve, or continuing with additional mental health support. If your symptoms are more severe, stopping the medication and getting prompt medical review may be appropriate.
If you are taking finasteride and are worried about its side effects, it is safe to stop immediately. Most side effects ease once the medication is out of your system, although a small number of people have reported symptoms that persist.
If you do decide to stop, this will mean that your hormone levels will gradually return to baseline and the hair growth seen with the drug will be lost over time.
If finasteride is not the right fit for you, there is another evidence-based alternative.
Topical minoxidil is a first-line treatment that can be used on its own or with other treatments and is available from pharmacies over the counter. It only works while itโs being used and may irritate the scalp, but its effectiveness is well-established and widely recommended.
While depression and anxiety are associated with minoxidil, the incidence is much lower because of their topical application.
There is also a medication called dutasteride. However, as it works in a similar way to finasteride, it may also increase your risk of developing mental health problems. So it is best to avoid dutasteride if finasteride is not suitable for you.
If this story has raised any issues for you, please contact one of the services below:
- Lifeline: 13 11 14 or lifeline.org.au
- Suicide Call Back Service (ages 15+): 1300 659 467 or suicidecallbackservice.org.au
Nial Wheate, Professor, School of Natural Sciences, Macquarie University and Jasmine Lee, Pharmacist and PhD Candidate, University of Sydney
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Breathe; Don’t Vent (At Least In The Moment)
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Zen And The Art Of Breaking Things
Weโve talked before about identifying emotions and the importance of being able to express them:
Answering The Most Difficult Question: How Are You?
However, there can be a difference between โexpressing how we feelโ and โbeing possessed by how we feel and bulldozing everything in our pathโ
โฆwhich is, of course, primarily a problem in the case of angerโand by extension, emotions that are often contemporaneous with anger, such as jealousy, shame, fear, etc.
How much feeling is too much?
While this is in large part a subjective matter, clinically speaking the key question is generally: is it adversely affecting daily life to the point of being a problem?
For example, if you have to spend half an hour every day actively managing a certain emotion, thatโs probably indicative of something unusual, but โunusualโ is not inherently bad. If youโre managing it safely and in a way that doesnโt negatively affect the rest of your life, then that is generally considered fine, unless you feel otherwise about it.
A good example of this is complicated grief and/or prolonged grief.
But what about when it comes to anger? How much is ok?
When it comes to those around you, any amount of anger can seem like too much. Anger often makes us short-tempered even with people who are not the object of our anger, and it rarely brings out the best in us.
We can express our feelings in non-aggressive ways, for example:
When You โCanโt Complainโ
and
Seriously Useful Communication Skills!
Sometimes, thereโs another way thoughโฆ
Breathe; donโt vent
Thatโs a great headline, but we canโt take the credit for it, because it came from:
Breathe, don’t vent: turning down the heat is key to managing anger
โฆin which it was found that, by all available metrics, the popular wisdom of โgetting it off your chestโ doesnโt necessarily stand up to scrutiny, at least in the short term:
โThe work was inspired in part by the rising popularity of rage rooms that promote smashing things (such as glass, plates and electronics) to work through angry feelings.
I wanted to debunk the whole theory of expressing anger as a way of coping with it,” she said. “We wanted to show that reducing arousal, and actually the physiological aspect of it, is really important.โ
And indeed, he and his team did find that various arousal-increasing activities (such as hitting a punchbag, breaking things, doing vigorous exercise) did not help as much as arousal-decreasing activities, such as mindfulness-based relaxation techniques.
If youโd like to read the full paper, then so would we, but we couldnโt get full access to this one yet. However, the abstract includes representative statistics, so thatโs worth a once-over:
Caveat!
Did you notice the small gap between their results and their conclusion?
In a lab or similar short-term observational setting, their recommendation is clearly correct.
However, if the source of your anger is something chronic and persistent, it could well be that calming down without addressing the actual cause is just โkicking the can down the roadโ, and will still have to actually be dealt with eventually.
So, while โhere be scienceโ, itโs not a mandate for necessarily suffering in silence. Itโs more about being mindful about how we go about tackling our anger.
As for a primer on mindfulness, feel free to check out:
No-Frills, Evidence-Based Mindfulness
Take care!
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Antidepressant Contact Lenses!
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…and other items from this week’s health science news:
Seeing life in a better light?
Bringing new meaning to the idea of “looking at the world through rose-tinted glasses”, researchers at Yonsei University have developed soft, transparent contact lenses with built-in ultrathin electrodes that deliver mild electrical stimulation through the retina*, and in mice with induced depression, this treatment produced antidepressant-like effects comparable to fluoxetine (Prozac) after three weeks.
*because the retina is anatomically directly connected to the brain (and by some reckonings, the eyes can even be considered to be extensions of the brain), researchers used it as a non-invasive access point to influence the neural pathways involved in mood regulation.
How it works: the lenses use temporal interference, where two harmless electrical signals intersect at precise points in the retina, allowing targeted stimulation of mood-related brain circuits, all without invasive brain implants or drugs.
What they did: depressed mice received 30 minutes of retinal stimulation daily for three weeks, and outcomes were compared with untreated depressed mice, healthy controls, and mice treated with fluoxetine.
What that did: treated mice had a 48% reduction in blood corticosterone (a stress hormone), a 47% increase in serotonin levels, and lower inflammatory markers in the brain compared with untreated depressed mice. Additionally, mice using the contact lenses showed reduced depression-like behaviors at levels similar to those seen with Prozac-treated mice.
You may be wondering how the scientists acquired depressed mice, and how they diagnosed the mental health of mice sufficiently clearly as to conduct this experiment. The answer is that they induced depression thus:
โA chronic corticosterone-induced stress mouse model recapitulating depression-associated behavioral phenotypes was established following the protocol outlined by Pereira et al. C3H/HeNCrlOri (rd1, 25โ30 g, male) mice were randomized into three groups, including the control (sham group), depression (Dep group), and TI-TES treatment (TES group). For depression induction, corticosterone by subcutaneous administration (s.c.) of a total 100 ฮผL of corticosterone cocktail (20 mg kgโ1 body weight) dissolved in 20% Tween 80, 0.2% DMSO (all purchased from Sigma, St. Louis, MO), and 0.9% saline were chronically treated. It should be noted that the corticosterone paradigm used in this study does not represent human major depressive disorder itself but rather a preclinical stress model that recapitulates specific behavioral and biological features associated with depression.โ
Translated from sciencese: they gave them drugs that resulted in the same behaviors and measurable biomarkers as depression; as such, this is broadly assumed to be representative of depression in humans, but is not necessarily exactly the same thing.]
Next, up the researchers want to test long-term safety in larger animals, and customize stimulation, before human clinical trials:
Read in full: Contact lenses treat depression in mice as effectively as anti-depressant medication
Related: Does This New Machine Cure Depression?
COVID in the house? This antiviral cuts transmission by โ !
Researchers (Dr. Anne Luetkemeyer et al.) found that taking ensitrelvir within 72 hours of the first household memberโs COVID symptom onset reduced the risk of symptomatic COVID in exposed household contacts by about two-thirds, compared to placebo.
In numbers:
- Dosage: participants took 375mg on day 1, then 125mg daily on days 2โ5.
- Effect: symptomatic COVID by day 10 occurred in 2.9% of the ensitrelvir group versus 9.0% of the placebo group (a 67% relative risk reduction).
- Interpretation: in the full intention-to-treat analysis, infection occurred in 4.4% with ensitrelvir versus 10.2% with placebo (a 57% relative risk reduction).
In the US, the FDA hasn’t weighed in on this one yet, but ensitrelvir is already approved in Japan for mild-to-moderate COVID treatment and, based on this trial, for postexposure prophylaxis.
You can read more about it here:
Read in full: Antiviral ensitrelvir cuts risk of COVID-19 in household contacts by two-thirds, study finds
Related: Getting antivirals for COVID too often depends on where you live and how wealthy youย are
Kratom crisis?
First, what kratom is: it’s a plant containing psychoactive compounds, most notably mitragynine, sold in powders, capsules, teas, liquid shots, and newer concentrated products such as 7-hydroxymitragynine (7-OH), which can be substantially more potent than traditional kratom.
A recent national survey analysis found kratom use in the US has reached its highest recorded level, with lifetime use rising from 1.6% of Americans aged 12+ in 2021 to 1.9% in 2024โmore than 5 million people, including over 100,000 adolescents aged 12โ17.
Yes, we’re getting these figures in 2026 because science takes its time sometimes (to analyze the data, get peer-reviewed, etc), so probably the numbers are even higher now.
In particular, synthetic or concentrated derivatives like 7-OH pose greater overdose or dependence risks because of much stronger opioid-like effects, and these products are increasingly sold in convenience stores and smoke shops:
Read in full: Kratom use is on the rise in the US
Related: Addiction Myths That Are Hard To Quit
Take care!
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Brain Health Action Plan โ by Dr. Teryn Clarke
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The author is a physician and neurologist, and she brings a lot of science with her when she sets out to Alzheimerโs-proof our brains:
- She talks about brain nourishment, and what things in contrast sabotage our brains, and how.
- She talks intermittent fasting, and optimal scheduling when it comes to food, sleep, exercise, and more.
- She talks about how the rest of our health affects our brain health, and vice versa.
The โaction planโ promised by the title includes all of those elements, plus such matters as ongoing education, cognitive stimulation, stress management, dealing with depression, and other mostly-brain-based factors.
As such, itโs not just a โfor your informationโ book, and Dr. Clarke does outline suggested goals, tasks, and habits, advises the use of a streak tracker, provides suggested recipes, and in all ways does what she can to make it easy for the reader to implement the information within.
Bottom line: if youโd like to dodge dementia, this book is quite a comprehensive guide.
Click here to check out Brain Health Action Plan, and enact yours!
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The GLP-1 Lifestyle โ by Dr. Joshua Hackett
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While GLP-1 receptor agonists (i.e. semaglutide drugs such as Ozempic and Wegovy) have enjoyed the spotlight as a miracle cure (with some drawbacks), this book argues very reasonably that we should see them as a tool that we can use (or not) as part of a holistic approach to manage our metabolism.
Unusually, Dr. Hackett doesnโt argue strongly for one way or another, when it comes to using GLP-1 RAs. Rather, he makes the case that they indeed have pros and cons, and we should not only be aware of those pros and cons before making a decision either way, but also, we must understand the process of what goes on.
In contrast to the โinject it and forget itโ marketing, he explains how if we actually understand whatโs happening in our metabolism, we can improve things for ourselves and, at the very least, avoid sabotaging ourselves. Again, this knowledge is applicable with or without the drugs.
Much of the book is spent covering the physiological underpinnings and how things work for people of various different sizes and metabolic rates, as well as everything youโd expect about dosing, side effects, and whatnotโas well as things you might not have considered closely related, such gut health, and the question of โis there any way to retain the slimmer figure after stopping?โ.
The style is methodical and clear, and not at all sensationalized. Itโs very much a โread it cover to coverโ book rather than a โdip inโ book, so be ready for that, though.
Bottom line: if you and/or a loved one are on GLP1-RAsโor on the fence about themโthis is a very even-minded and helpfully explanatory book.
Click here to check out The GLP-1 Lifestyle, and transform your metabolism!
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Easy Ways To Fix Brittle, Dry, Wiry Hair
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Dr. Sam Ellis, a dermatologist, specializes in skin, hair, and nail careโand sheโs here with professional knowledge:
Tackling the problem at the root
As we age, hair becomes less shiny, more brittle, coarse, wiry, or gray. More concerningly for many, hair thinning and shedding increases due to shortened growth phases and hormonal changes.
The first set of symptoms there are largely because sebum production decreases, leading to dry hair. It’s worth bearing in mind though, that factors like UV radiation, smoking, stress, and genetics contribute to hair aging too. So while we can’t do much about genetics, the modifiable factors are worth addressing.
Menopause and the corresponding “andropause” impact hair health, and hormonal shifts, not just aging, drive many hair changes. Which is good to know, because it means that HRT (mostly: topping up estrogen or testosterone as appropriate) can make a big difference. Additionally, topical/oral minoxidil and DHT blockers (such as finasteride or dutasteride) can boost hair density. These things come with caveats though, so do research any possible treatment plan before embarking on it, to be sure you are comfortable with all aspects of itโincluding that if you use minoxidil, while on the one hand it indeed works wonders, on the other hand, you’ll then have to keep using minoxidil for the rest of your life or your hair will fall out when you stop. So, that’s a commitment to be thought through before beginning.
Nutritional deficiencies (iron, zinc, vitamin D) and insufficient protein intake hinder hair growth, so ensure proper nutrition, with sufficient protein and micronutrients.
While we’re on the topic of “from the inside” things: take care to manage stress healthily, as stress negatively affects hair health.
Now, as for “from the outside”…
Dr. Ellis recommends moisturizing shampoos/conditioners; Virtue and Dove brands she mentions positively. She also recommends bond repair products (such as K18 and Olaplex) that restore hair integrity, and heat protectants (she recommends: Unite 7 Seconds) as well as hair oils in general that improve hair condition.
For more on all of this, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesnโt Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like to read:
Take care!
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Ready to Run โ by Kelly Starrett
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If you’d like to get into running, and think that maybe the barriers are too great, this is the book for you.
Kelly Starrett approaches running less from an “eye of the tiger” motivational approach, and more from a physiotherapy angle.
The first couple of chapters of the book are explanatory of his philosophy, the key component of which being:
Routine maintenance on your personal running machine (i.e., your body) can be and should be performed by you.
The second (and largest) part of the book is given to his “12 Standards of Maintenance for Running“. These range from neutral feet and flat shoes, to ankle, knee, and hip mobilization exercises, to good squatting technique, and more.
After that, we have photographs and explanations of maintenance exercises that are functional for running.
The fourth and final part of the book is about dealing with injuries or medical issues that you might have.
And if you think you’re too old for it? In Starrett’s own words:
โProblems are going to keep coming. Each one is a gift wanting to be openedโsome new area of performance you didn’t know you had, or some new efficiency to be gained. The 90- to 95-year-old division of the Masters Track and Field Nationals awaits. A Lifelong commitment to solving each problem that creeps up is the ticket.โ
In short: this is the book that can get you back out doing what you perhaps thought you’d left behind you, and/or open a whole new chapter in your life.
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