Anyone keeping up with the British tabloids and gossip sites has probably heard by now that actor Sean Ward—who rose to fame in the U.K. when he played a drug dealer on the soap opera Coronation Street—says he watched so much porn that his hair fell out.
On a recent visit with daytime talk show Loose Women, the thirty-year-old actor and model pointed out the bald spots in his beard as he described that he’d developed alopecia and lost weight at the height of his porn addiction. But before you run to the store for some Rogaine and start installing porn blockers on all your devices, take a deep breath.
Watching porn won’t make your hair fall out.
The Mayo Clinic website asserts that stressful events can cause hair loss, as can an autoimmune condition called alopecia areata. But there’s no mention—there or anywhere else we can find—that links wanking to hair loss.
In Ward’s case it seems most likely that the follicle malfunction was caused by stress driven by the deep depression that he was using porn, cannabis, and alcohol to self-medicate with.
During the interview, which is part of Ward’s courageous efforts to raise awareness about depression and suicide in men, he revealed that his depression began when he was on set in South Africa. Away from home for over half a year to film Our Girl, he began feeling lonely and took to drugs, alcohol, and porn to fill “this void,” as he put it. By the time he returned home, he was in the grips of depression. “I had to leave the relationship I was in—I wasn’t really looking after my ex-partner’s needs. There was no intimacy.”
The stress of his depression, his relationship ending, and then going on fifty auditions in a year without booking any work, he says, combined to leave him so depressed that he experienced physical symptoms—like alopecia.
Ward has since quit all three of his vices, as he announced to his Instagram viewers in a video just after Christmas. He’s fighting his way out of depression and raising awareness about depression and suicide as he does—a worthy goal. But the media has really homed in on porn and the alopecia, conflating the two as more closely related than they are.
But don’t let them fool you. You can, indeed, keep watching your favorite porn and cam stars without risking your coif.
