Wednesday, August 5, 2026

F63.3 is Trichotillomania, and its official inclusion term in the ICD-10-CM tabular is two words: 'Hair plucking.' That sounds like a habit. It is a psychiatric diagnosis with real medical consequences, and it hides one of the sharpest classification traps in the code set. DSM-5 groups trichotillomania with obsessive-compulsive and related disorders - but ICD-10-CM does not. It sits in F63, Impulse disorders, next to pyromania and kleptomania, while its closest clinical cousin, F42.4 Excoriation (skin-picking) disorder, sits over in the F42 obsessive-compulsive block. Two body-focused repetitive behaviors, two different neighborhoods, and the classification you code from is the tabular, not the manual on the clinician's shelf.