i just read through the whole thread at https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=55565.40 and i kept thinking about a particular thing. this is something i've thought about before in conjunction with your lifestyle when you lived with me. i think the products you use and the frequency with which you shower might be very detrimental to you.
 
sodium lauryl sulfates and other chemicals are in the hair and body products that you use. just look up sodium lauryl sulfates and there's a huge amount of information about their harmfulness. showering/bathing every day may not show symptoms for awhile, but there is a cumulative damage that goes on, and perhaps your immune system was strong enough to keep it from your awareness until the stress of the apartment your father made you live in. the experience in that apartment could have been a trigger for you to become hyper-aware of the detriment caused by sodium lauryl sulfates (and other chemicals in personal cleansing products) while at the same time weakening your body and causing all the symptoms to become more severe, and then your increased bathing in response will continue to further dry and strip your skin and hair of essential oils and even destroy the cells.
 
the description you gave of your hair strands falling apart is pretty much the same as what i used to experience when i was bleaching my hair and dying it green and then swimming laps in the lawrence university pool and not always showering afterwards to wash the chlorine off myself. i had never had any problems with dry skin before in my life and i really didn't care about damaging my hair. i developed guttate psoriasis after i graduated because i was going swimming every single day and the chlorine was damaging my skin to the point that my immune system was mistaking damaged skin cells for pathogens. first i started to shower more diligently after swimming, to remove the chlorine, but that didn't help and it made my skin drier and made the psoriasis worse. i tried using lotions and they made it worse. i had to go to new york to perform in rocky horror picture show and i was very concerned about what looked like a terrible rash all over my skin when i had to perform nearly naked in front of thousands of people, so i saw a doctor and got a cream for the psoriasis before i went to new york, and stopped swimming for about a week to give the cream a chance to fix my skin. the cream worked. i went to new york and it was all good. i came back and started swimming again and the psoriasis came back. then it got cold and i stopped swimming and i used some more of my cream because the winter was giving me dry skin in a way that it never had before, but by the spring of 2005 the psoriasis was under control and my swimming habits were sadly interrupted and i never did get back into that routine.
 
anyways, the whole time i'd been swimming and bleaching/dying my hair, i was well aware of how this was killing it. and it was pretty much just like you described your own hair. i chopped all my hair off a year or so later, and eventually shaved most of my head as you know. once i started letting my hair grow out again, it was thick and lush and undamaged like when i was a child. it was beautiful. i always knew i could do that, so i never worried about what i was doing to my hair. play with it, kill it, it'll just grow back.
 
but the psoriasis on my skin prompted me to do a lot of research into chemicals and their impact, and i've done a lot of experiments and noticed a significant difference between using commercial products versus using super-expensive custom-made all-natural products. i couldn't really afford the super expensive products, so i opted to shower and wash my hair much less frequently, to conserve the products i'd purchased.  i had already learned during college that if i go for a month or so without bathing, once my hair got through the greasy phase, it was suddenly wonderful, as though it was conditioned, even though it wasn't even washed. but when i was trying to conserve my expensive shampoo and body wash stuff, i discovered that simply decreasing my showering to 2 or 3 times a week instead of daily, had visible results of better skin and hair within a couple weeks, and greatly greatly reduced dry skin. ever since the psoriasis in 2004, i'd had terrible problems with dry skin in the winter, itchiness that was so bad i'd scratch until i bled sometimes. but after i stopped showering daily, i haven't had that kind of dry skin ever since.
 
my situation is different from yours in very significant regards, but i think certain similarities are notable and will hopefully give you more insight into your own condition and help you figure out how to heal from it.
 
another thing i thought of while reading that forum thread was when someone mentioned vitamin B and other nutritional deficiencies. i know people who have had anorexia-related nutritional deficiencies who had similar symptoms as yours, but their experiences were related to me vaguely so i don't have much to share on this topic, other than that this is definitely something to look into. i personally have varying degrees of B and D vitamin deficiencies from time to time because of my almost meatless diet and my alcoholism, and one prominent side effect of this is that my skin bruises and tears and scars very easily and takes a long time to heal. i've never had particularly sensitive skin, but i can imagine how easily-damaged and hyper-sensitive could arise from the same sort of phenomenon.