James, 41

I've been doing this since I was about eleven. That's thirty years. I didn't know it was anything other than a bad habit I had until a few months ago when I finally looked it up properly. Thirty years of something happening every single day without knowing what it was or that it had a name. That's a strange thing to sit with.

At eleven, twelve, my back was starting to get spots and I picked at them. I was a bit of a solitary kid, a lot of time spent alone in my room, which I think created the conditions for it. It became part of how I wound down. After school, before bed. The picking was a consistent private ritual across the whole of my adolescence and into adulthood, and I just never thought to ask what it was.

Mine is almost entirely tactile, not visual. I can't see most of my back, so it's my hands doing the work - searching, finding rough patches or raised areas, and picking at them. It happens mostly when I'm alone, late at night, or when I'm in my home office with the door shut.

The urge is a bit like an itch you can't leave. Not painful, not urgent, just persistent. Once I've found an active site there's a drive to work at it. It can go on for an hour if I'm not interrupted. The skin on my back is extensively scarred after thirty years of this. I have areas that have been picked at hundreds of times. I don't pick those areas as much now as I used to - partly desensitisation, partly because there isn't much new surface to find.

Afterwards I feel a bit flat. Not guilty in a dramatic way - it's too normalised for that. Just the low-level background awareness that I've done it again and I'd rather not have.

I haven't explained it to anyone. My wife knows I have skin issues - she's seen my back - but we've never talked about it properly. She's made the kind of gentle concerned comments you make when you don't want to push something and I've deflected. I haven't had the conversation yet where I tell her what it actually is.

Part of what makes this hard, being a man with this, is that skin picking isn't something that shows up much in conversations that men have. Body-focused stuff, grooming, appearance anxiety, these are coded as female concerns in a way that makes it harder to even have the internal language for. I genuinely don't think it occurred to me to frame this as a mental health thing because I'd never seen it framed that way in anything that was aimed at me. It felt like something shameful and private, not something with a name and a community and treatment options.

Swimming with the kids. That's the main one, and it matters. We live near a lido and in the summer we go, and I sit on the side with a shirt on while my kids swim. I've been doing that for nine years. I told myself I just didn't enjoy swimming, or that my back hurt, or various other things that were partly true and mostly not the real reason.

My older son asked me directly a few weeks ago. He's nine. He'd been watching me sit on the side and he asked why I never come in the water. I said my back hurt. He looked at me for a second and went back to swimming. He's nine and he already knew I wasn't being straight with him. That was when I went home and looked it up properly for the first time.

Holidays with other adults. Anywhere with a changing room situation. Anything where I might need to be shirtless. I've avoided these things for thirty years in ways that have become invisible to me because the avoidance is so established. The night my son asked me that question was the first time I actually listed them in my head and felt the weight of all of it.

The swim question, and the night I searched afterwards. I found the word dermatillomania. I found that it's a recognised condition in the DSM, that it's common, that it's more common in women statistically but that it absolutely affects men too, and that there are specific treatments. All of that landed in one sitting late at night at my kitchen table.

I felt, in a somewhat embarrassing way, quite emotional about it. Thirty years of thinking this was just something wrong with me specifically, a character weakness, a dirty habit I couldn't shake. And it turns out there's a clinical name for it and it's been studied and there are trained therapists who specialise in it. I felt very late to the information. But also very relieved.

Very early. I've told my wife. That was a week ago and I'm still processing the conversation - she was kind, and surprised I'd never said anything, and we talked for a long time. I've started reading about a treatment approach called habit reversal training - basically learning to catch the urge early and have something else ready to do instead. I haven't properly started yet. I'm still at the stage of just getting my head around what I'm dealing with.

The thing I want most right now is to be able to swim with my kids. That's a simple and specific goal. I don't need my back to look completely different - it'll never look the way it would have if I hadn't picked for thirty years. But I want to get in the water. I want to stop lying to my son about my back.

I think I need professional support. I've been looking at what's available. I'm a bit resistant to therapy in the abstract but I'm more motivated than I've ever been, which I think is the main ingredient.

If you're a man reading this: it happens to men too. The information about this condition is often framed in ways that make it seem like a women's issue. It isn't. The statistics show women are diagnosed more often, which probably reflects who seeks help rather than who has the condition. Men get this. Men carry it alone for decades because there's no language for it in spaces where men talk. You are not a uniquely broken exception.

Look it up. Actually read about it. Find the name and find the community and find the clinical information. The night I did that was the most useful thing I'd done about this in thirty years, and it took about forty minutes. I don't know why I waited until I was forty-one but I did, and if you're still waiting: you don't have to be.

Tell someone you trust. I told my wife. The conversation I'd been avoiding for years took about an hour and she was on my side immediately. The secret was keeping me alone with something I really didn't need to be alone with.