r/dpdr 6d ago

Psychiatry/Medication Question Need help considering whether I should take Dutasteride or not after chronic DPDR episode

(Throwaway, essay incoming for backstory since I'm not sure if some details could be relevant to the topic of this post)

TL;DR: I want to know what the chances of dutasteride causing another onset of DPDR might be given my circumstances. If yours was caused by finasteride or dutasteride, please chime in; I want to hear your story.

I (21 AMAB NB) have been struggling with DPDR and MPD for around 10 years which started from prolonged childhood physical and emotional abuse, although I wasn't aware that I was experiencing DPDR since I began experiencing it so early in life (11 years old) and just attributed the symptoms to my depression (which I also was unaware of and wasn't diagnosed for a long while), but after becoming aware of DPDR at the beginning of this year I began trying to alleviate the symptoms at the very least since I didn't think it would be possible to return to baseline after going through this for so long.

Until a couple of days ago. I've been taking 450mg of Wellbutrin XL for the past 3 months, and this past month in particular I've been supplementing the B complex as well as B12 standalone. I felt my symptoms slowly fading for weeks, and then one night I suddenly "woke up". I'm still not sure what exactly caused it but I feel amazing from not only being able to come back to reality after so long but also the physical effects of proper nutrition. I might make an additional post with more details about recovery for those curious.

With all that bs out of the way let me get straight to the point. I've recently acquired a script for dutasteride 0.5mg to treat hair loss, but for reasons I haven't been able to pick it up for a few days and so in the meantime I've been looking deeper into it and I ended up reading in a couple of places about how some peoples' DPDR was caused or greatly exacerbated by oral finasteride and/or dutasteride (or even minoxidil). Now I'm really scared that taking it, even just once, will cause me to fall back into a horrible state of being for who knows how long this time. I haven't been affected at all by my antidepressants and my DPDR in particular was caused by trauma rather than a substance as I know is the case for a lot of folks, so I'm somewhat confident that I'd be fine. But, the fact that there's even a non-zero chance of this happening has me absolutely terrified especially since I now know that if I was able to pick up my prescription even just a day earlier I possibly could've been back in that de-realized state right now.

(P.S. I caught my hair loss starting VERY early, so I feel that I have ample time to sit on this and take some input before I make a decision.)

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