A man with alopecia said he was beaten up, had drink bottles thrown at him and had his jacket ripped while at school.
NHS worker Dean Boyle, 33, from Huyton, spoke about his own experience of bullying after witnessing Chris Rock joke about Jada Pinkett Smith's alopecia during the Academy Awards ceremony on March 28. Her husband, Will Smith, was banned from the Academy for 10 years on Friday, April 8, for hitting Rock in response.
Alopecia is an autoimmune condition that causes hair loss. Dean started losing his hair when he was 10, initially in clumps that grew back before baldness spread across most of his body from 2019. He struggled with the "emotional trauma of losing your hair", which sparked an "identity crisis" when he barely recognised the person looking back at him in the mirror.
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He worries the debate raging over the rights and wrongs of Will Smith punching Chris Rock takes focus away from the comedian's "inappropriate" joke about. Dean said it takes a lot of courage "to get to the stage where she's attending the Academy Awards with her hair completely shaved off". But not everyone "builds up to that point where you're confident enough to go out like this and accept that this is who you are, how you are, and you won't be disrespected for being the person that you are."
While some dismiss Rock's words as a joke, Dean said comments like those can have a real impact on people, pointing to the case of Rio Allred, a 12-year-old girl with alopecia who was bullied and took her own life. Dean said: "A lot of people seem to not be able to actually see the effect and power those words can have on another person. And it saddens me because I feel that if someone said that to me if I was at school, that would be referred to as bullying."
Seeing the Oscars saga brought back memories of stares and cruel jokes he endured at secondary school. Dean recalled: "Every time I would go into school I would find it more and more difficult because it started to make me feel that I was different when I wasn't - I had alopecia. I was no more different to anybody else. I just had a condition."
He kept going, even when he thought he couldn't, but the scars of that bullying lingered. Dean lost his confidence again as an adult, becoming "quite upset and quite anxious" when all his hair fell out. He said: "I felt like people would be looking at me, and not me but my hair. I felt people would be looking closer at me thinking, 'Oh he's not got any eyebrows, he looks really ill', or people would be laughing at me at my own expense.
"When it was at its worst, I didn't go out as much because, after losing all my hair and losing my confidence, it kind of took my identity away. It was hard to see myself as much as it was for other people to see me. I hated the way I looked so much I'd lose sleep over it."
Dean finally found self-acceptance when he joined an Alopecia UK Facebook group and spoke to others with the condition. He said: "I spent a few days reading what other people were posting. All of a sudden, straight away, I just felt at home because people were talking about things that I was feeling, people were talking about things that I was thinking. It was so relatable. All of a sudden, I no longer felt alone with this experience."
The community fueled Dean's confidence, inspiring him to speak out in the hope of helping others feeling isolated or misunderstood. Having people as prominent as Jada Pinkett Smith be so visible and open with alopecia encourages others to follow suit. Dean said people in Facebook groups he's in felt comfortable going to work without a wig for the first time because of her.
He told the ECHO: "I think it's absolutely inspiring, I think it's incredible, because it makes you feel that, if she can do, I can do it. To be able to build yourself to the point she is, where she's just absolutely embraced it and it's more like, 'This is me, this is who I am, I'm not embarrassed, I'm not ashamed, I've got nothing to be embarrassed or ashamed about', that's wonderful to see. It's infectious."
