Ricki Lake Is Speaking Out About Her 'Maddening' 30-Year Struggle with Hair Loss: 'No One in My Life Knew the Level of Deep Pain and Trauma'

Ricki Lake’s role in Hairspray may have launched her career — but it also came with unintended consequences the actress is only opening up about now. Lake revealed a shaved head and detailed her “maddening” struggle with hair loss on social media on New Year’s Day, breaking decades of silence. Lake says her hair has never been the same since playing Tracy Turnblad, and gets devastatingly real about the pain her hair loss has caused her.

The 51-year-old posted on Instagram and Facebook on January 1 with photos of her shaved head and a long, heartfelt caption about what she’s gone through and why she’s speaking out now. “First things first, I am not sick. (THANK GOD.),” Lake wrote. “I am not having a mid-life crisis. nor am I having a mental breakdown, though I have been suffering. Suffering mostly in silence off and on for almost 30 years.”

“I have been struggling with hair loss for most of my adult life,” she continued. “It has been debilitating, embarrassing, painful, scary, depressing, lonely, all the things. There have been a few times where I have even felt suicidal over it. Almost no one in my life knew the level of deep pain and trauma I was experiencing.”

The actress says the problems started after filming Hairspray, but the damage continued long after: “They triple-processed and teased my then healthy virgin hair every 2 weeks during filming [Hairspray], my hair was never the same…Working as talent on various shows and movies, whether DWTS or my talk show, also took its toll on my fine hair.”

Rattling off the types of extensions, wigs, and “a total hair system” she’d tried, Lake sounds exhausted: “I’ve been to many doctors, gotten steroid shots in my head, taking all the supplements and then some. My hair would recover and then shed again. It was maddening.”

So, Lake is coming into 2020 determined to raise awareness around this issue: “I know that by sharing my truth, I will be striking a chord with so so many women and men,” she wrote. “I am not alone in this and my goal is to help others.”

“This time, I say no more. I have to be set free,” she continued on Facebook. “For 2020 and beyond, I want to be real.”