Nothing to do with psychotherapy. Plumbing, nerves, muscles, bodily functions - stuff like that completely disrupted and fucked up. is all I can say in this public context.

Let me put this way: Assuming you only get 1 life on this earth, 1 body, one chance. You get certain bodily functions that basically work the same way from puberty into your older age assuming no other harm or accident. You are in mid adulthood you try a drug for a few months. you quit that drug because weird symptoms develop. shortly after stopping those symptoms magnify and then persist. you can classify the persistence in two categories (1) persistent irrevisble, my body worked this X or Y way in this or that category my entire life now it doesnt and hasnt for years. (2) slowly reversing with random waves of lingering symptoms. there is a small % of people that will get permanent issues from ssri similarly and for finasteride its a small % that get totally messed up. and i tried straterra (an ssri) once and had side effect that made me quit. read worse cases than mine but there is a subjectively persistent pushback that its all a delusional mental problem but if i knew you and talked to you in a secure setting and i can assure you this drug is exceptionally dangerous to a small % of people that try it and seems like we have no science and or data to tell who is at risk anywhere close reasonable safety.

I think you underestimate the potential physiological effects of a traumatic experience, which is why I asked for the specific symptoms you experienced. If they're limited to those known to be caused by trauma, then that might be the mechanism by which the drug caused the problems (and it might be treatable). I do not believe that finasteride would cause permanent, untreatable problems – but if it does, then it does so by a completely unknown mechanism, and investigating that mechanism is extremely important to our understanding of the human body.

If you would be willing to contact me privately about this, there are various ways for you to do so.

If youd like im not totally opposed. still there is a wealth of real testimonials online, including pubmed. and what you write in your reply is valid, i guess to go through the experience is just so stark to someone who hasnt. ive talked to others and there is always a connection on the fact that its just not understood to read it vs go thru. you can also see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45507257

Traumatic stress is known to affect the response to alcohol in rats: see "The persistent effects of exposure to a predator odor stressor on sensitivity to alcohol" (2025) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.addicn.2025.100230. They found different results in male and female rats: depending on the exact mechanism, finasteride might specifically affect this. (We could ask them to re-run the experiment with a "male taking finasteride" group, and see what happens? But I'd personally want to determine what's developmental, what's genetic, and what's hormonal, and quantify the effects, before running such a specific study.)

This might compound with the findings described in "Alcohol and Placebo: The Role of Expectations and Social Influence" (2020) https://doi.org/10.1007/s11469-020-00321-0:

> We suggest that expectations of inebriation formed by socialization and experiences can explain most of the behavioural changes following alcohol consumption.

If you can find someone who experienced these effects from taking finasteride, which persisted when they stopped taking it, despite them not ever really minding the symptoms at all, then that'd be evidence that my "it's trauma-related" theory is wrong. But all I'm aware of is people getting really distressed about normal/known side-effects of finasteride, and then afterwards they report a slew of other symptoms that are associated with PTSD.

We don't know which direction the arrow of causality points, and I'm not sure how to establish that.