Human 'captivity' may precipitate hair pulling?

Self-directed behaviours affect animals raised in captivitiy - fur biting, hair pulling, feather plucking...so it is fair to say that environmental disruption is a strong link with these behaviours.  So, can self-directed behaviours in humans also be traced similarly?  The psychoanalyst R.D. Laing famously pronounced that man is a captive animal - which I take to mean that his social boundaries are ones imposed by modern society but are not ones that characterize humanity's evolutionary history.  

When environments go wrong it means that some essential behaviour is being frustrated or unsupported.  For example, the conditions for rest and relaxation require a level of comfort and sense of safety from danger.  But what if drowsiness arouses fear of attack or the loss of control over the proximity of others?  Where the need to maintain wariness and the need to achieve sleep are in prolonged conflict it could mean that the onset of drowsiness could become a trigger for displacement behaviours.  These might serve to resist the transition to unconsciousness until a window of opportunity - where risk to safety is tolerable - arrives.

There are many ways too that people can feel 'caged' by their environment.  Maybe they are being brought up in a home where parents are enforcing certain rules or boundaries too strongly.  Or maybe one of the following situations has arisen:  judging a child by adult standards of behaviour; limiting physical movement; restricting vocal expression; disapproval of touching and grooming behaviour; preventing free playfulness; imposing social separation and isolation for prolonged periods; creating power imbalances; affording limited or unsuitable living space.  With all of these situations there lies the risk that, as with caged laboratory animals, the species specific conditions that behaviours rely upon to get their cue or derive their setting point are undermined. The organism may retain the propensity towards a particular action or state, but  the environment continually fails to allow its expression.  This creates a stop-start-stop-start experience which eventually becomes resolved through a third behaviour which deactivates this whole uncomfortable process but produces a new and unwanted chain of events.

Many parents fail to perceive or understand their offspring as children - but impose the same conditions that were imposed on them.  Any parent who demonstrates behaviours such as nail biting, hair pulling or self-directed symptoms is, in my view, revealing signs of being poorly embedded in their social environment.  The danger here is that if the parent is poorly adjusted the child may be even more extremely affected because the parent IS the child's environment!  In the most extreme of cases, the parent creates a barren cage for its offspring.