How about compulsive nail biting, knuckle cracking or pica, the disorder that causes people to eat substances like cornstarch, chalk or dirt?
In her backstory, her parents refused to believe her as a child about her brother's abuse towards her, and upset, she bites her doll and develops a compulsive habit of biting.
BFRBs, or Body-Focused Repetitive Behaviors, include trichotillomania (hair pulling), dermatillomania (skin picking), nail biting, skin/cheek biting, and many other compulsive behaviors involving the body.
"Blood," about a man whose midlife crisis manifests itself as a compulsive desire to bite the heads off chickens, is simply strange.
He was biting, spitting and showing compulsive habits.
In this systematic review we find favorable evidence for the use of NAC in several psychiatric and neurological disorders, particularly autism, Alzheimer's disease, cocaine and cannabis addiction, bipolar disorder, depression, trichotillomania, nail biting, skin picking, obsessive-compulsive disorder, schizophrenia, drug-induced neuropathy and progressive myoclonic epilepsy.
The American Psychiatric Association's "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders," classifies nail biting as a form of OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder).
If you're a compulsive early adopter, you tend to get bitten.
Correction: An earlier version of this story conflated the compulsive grooming disorders of nail-biting and hair-pulling.
The author, a psychotherapist and addictions specialist, notes that "for many people a cookie is just a cookie," while for compulsive overeaters "a cookie is the culinary equivalent of a loaded gun: one bite can send them spiraling into a hell realm of insatiable desire".
