Do you tell 'em?

[Davey Jones]

I was visiting family this last Easter, and I got to talking with my cousin's husband (is that what a second cousin is?), Mark. He's a fellow baldy, and inevitibly, the conversation always hits on our shared condition. It's funny to me how comforting joking about being bald with a fellow baldy can be, as a contrast to how a non-balding person even bringing up the subject can make me want to rip their jaw off and hide away in shame somewhere with it. Ashamed of the balding, that is, not the jaw ripping. That part would be justified.

Anyway, this other guy, Kyle, takes his hat off to scratch his head, and someone mentions that he's losing his hair a bit too. He explains that it's just the hat, and everyone accepts this and moves on. Worst part is, I can see in his face that Kyle believes his hat excuse too. Now, I'm no doctor, but most of us here, through our struggle, have become some of the world's foremost experts on hairloss, and I know androgenic alopecia when I see it. This dude's hat was not deviously ripping his hairs out in a pattern baldness format, just to mess with him. His grandfathers screwed him over, not his accessories.

This is far from the first time I've seen this behavior. Another big one is, "Oh, I'm not balding; I'm just really stressed right now." My fellow hairloss experts are shaking their heads. "Pff, telogen effluvium is cleeeearly a different disorder." But the layman (though likely future hairloss expert) doesn't know that yet. They don't WANT to know that, because knowing that is akin to knowing that they're balding.

My question here is this: "How do you/would you handle this situation, a person in that dreaded first Stage of Grieving, denial?" Do you tell them, so they can start trying to counter the effects now? Or...is ignorance bliss? Do you let them figure it out on their own time? Let them have the last six months, maybe a year, of being able to reasonably pretend that it isn't happening to them?

I can see it both ways. In this particular situation, that guy Kyle f---ing sucks, so I didn't really care. But the situation at least got me thinking!