Anyone who has no personal experience of it could be forgiven for asking the question “how serious is vitiligo anyway?” I understand why vitiligo (a.k.a. leukoderma) hasn’t received the attention it deserves. Certainly a lot less funding and research as other medical conditions and diseases. For one thing, too many sufferers have been, like I was, reluctant to talk about it. And so general awareness of the condition has been poor. Also, it is not life-threatening, not physically debilitating, and not contagious. Understandably attention tends to go to diseases like cancer, heart disease, etc. and to the difficulties faced by people with disabilities. So can we even talk about vitiligo in terms of being a serious medical condition?
Vitiligo is not a life-threatening disease
I once spent a summer caring for man who suffered horrific injuries in a car crash. Permanently confined to a wheel chair, he had the use of his right arm only. Not only that, but he suffered brain damage, which left him with very severe speech difficulties and poor memory. He had been a fit and talented man in the prime of life when he had his accident.
He still had a keen wit, wicked sense of humour, and painful memories of an outstanding musical talent that he can no longer pursue. This gifted man has to undergo the daily indignity of being hoisted in and out of bed, on and off the toilet, etc by a succession of carers. Being one of them for a few months was, for me, a humbling and sobering experience and one that filled me with compassion for people who find themselves in his predicament. And, to my shame, it also fills me with gratitude that I am not so unfortunate as to be in that situation myself.
So I don’t want to overstate the plight of vitiligo sufferers. I don’t mean to dramatise or exaggerate the seriousness of the condition. But I do know, from my own experience, that the psychological effects of vitiligo are very personal and individual. And these are really not mitigated by making comparisons with other conditions. Counting oneself lucky not to have cancer or be in a wheel chair instead doesn’t make it any better.
I know that some people with vitiligo claim to have come to terms with the condition. They say that it does not bother them at all. (And I don’t doubt their sincerity.) Sadly, I have never been one of them and I suspect they are in the minority.
Vitiligo can be psychologically serious
Granted, having vitiligo is not the cataclysmic calamity that a terminal cancer or severely disabling injury would be. But I do know that its effects on a person’s confidence and self-image can be quite devastating. The unpredictable and progressive nature of the condition can cause an insidious erosion of one’s own sense of self. One day a familiar face looks back at you from the mirror and the next day you can see part of the picture fading and you know that in a few more days another piece of the jigsaw will have disappeared and a frightened, unfamiliar pair of eyes will be looking back at you from behind an altered facial landscape.
A sudden change to the person you perceive yourself to be must be difficult enough to come to terms with. But an apparently random, mischievous, malevolent and progressive alteration is unnerving at best and often panic inducing and deeply, deeply depressing. I suppose it has a lot to do with the fact that our skin is our outer packaging. It is our first impression to the world. Beauty is just skin deep, or so they say. It’s inextricably bound up with our own sense of identity, heredity, race and self-worth. And it’s not something that we ever expect to alter – apart from becoming wrinkly with old age.
So, there is no simple answer to the question, how serious is vitiligo? It depends so much on your circumstances and personality. And it depends on what you compare it to… except that comparisons are entirely subjective and, in my experience, rarely helpful.
[Happily, there are numerous things you can do to improve your vitiligo significantly. To read what I did to reverse mine see The Vitiligo Therapy That Worked.]