- #What does it mean to bite your thumb at someone manual#
- #What does it mean to bite your thumb at someone skin#
In both cases, it's taking a behavior that's normal and healthy and putting it into overdrive, doing it to the point of being excessive. That includes people who wash their hands compulsively or have to line up their shoes a certain way.
Until recently, the DSM treated pathological grooming a bit like an afterthought and put it in a catch-all category called "not otherwise classified." But the new DSM proposes to lump together pathological groomers and those with mental disorders like OCD. "It becomes just an automatic behavior that has no relationship to external stimuli at all." "After a while, the behavior becomes untriggered," says Mathews. Instead of being triggered by, say, a hangnail, the pathological nail biter is triggered by driving, reading or feeling stressed out. "They are behaviors that stem from normal grooming - the kind of thing that most animals do and is evolutionarily adaptive, right?" says Mathews.īut in pathological groomers, those behaviors go haywire.
#What does it mean to bite your thumb at someone skin#
Mathews specializes in pathological grooming - a group of behaviors that includes nail biting, hair pulling, called trichotillomania, and skin picking, known as dermatillomania. Looks like you're a recovered nail biter is what I'd say," she pointed out. But I was feeling quite pleased with myself when I showed them to Carol Mathews, a psychiatrist at the University of California, San Francisco. Recently, something happened that made me finally quit biting my nails. I hated filling out forms in public places. At parties, I learned to wrap my fingers all the way around my wine glass, so that my nails faced my chest.
It was embarrassing - like wearing your neuroses on your sleeve. My reaction: "How cool! How grown-up! I think I'll try it."
She paused to mull something over, chewing on a nail. I was 6 years old, watching my mom get dressed for work. I can tell you the exact moment I became a nail biter. This rethinking gives pathological groomers some new ways to think about those behaviors. A new version is coming out early next year, and it puts pathological grooming in the same category as another disorder you've probably heard of: obsessive compulsive disorder, or OCD.
#What does it mean to bite your thumb at someone manual#
We nail biters can be "pathological groomers" - people for whom normal grooming behaviors, like skin picking or hair pulling, have become virtually uncontrollable.īut psychiatry is changing the way it thinks about pathological grooming, and these changes will be reflected in the American Psychiatric Association's DSM, short for Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Pathological nail biting may be a form of grooming on steroids, but it also makes the biter feel good, unlike fear-driven OCD.ĭo you bite your nails? For 30 years, I did.