<p>I was channel surfing and landed on TLC and a show called, “My Strange Addiction”.
Boy oh boy! </p>
<p>One woman had a addiction of eating household cleaner (think, Comet or Ajax).</p>
<p>A young girl had an addiction to tanning. She spend a total of 60 minutes a day (each and every day) in a tanning bed. She would go to 3 different tanning places during the day and spend 20 min. at each.</p>
<p>Right now, there is a show about one woman who is addicted to ventriloquism and another who is addicted to cats.</p>
<p>The young girl will likely get skin cancer every early in her life as well as very wrinkled skin. Wonder where she gets her $$$? Hope she has good health insurance! That show sounds pretty odd. I know a woman who has about 15 cats, all living in her small place. She has to have 1.5 full-time jobs to pay all the vet bills & other expenses!</p>
<p>I saw a preview for one that was about a woman addicted to eating the foam stuffing from sofa cushions. Yuck!</p>
<p>These kind of shows remind me of the old travelling circus acts— people would come and pay to see the ‘freaks’, the man with two heads, the werewolf man, and the lady with an extra foot.</p>
<p>Wow, eating the foam stuffing could be extremely dangerous on many levels, as it compresses and then expands. I hope the show tries to get help for these people instead of just exploiting them and giving them their minutes of fame, feeding their addictions.</p>
<p>I’d love to see a follow-up of the woman addicted to tanning, in 10 years and then 20 years. That would scare the next generation off tanning forever.</p>
<p>I saw last night’s show with a woman who sleep with the (running) hairdryer every night despite having suffered burn injuries in the past. Her three year old D is now doing the same thing. </p>
<p>The “tanning girl” was on the same episode. I wonder if she thinks it makes her more attractive or if there is something else she gets from the tanning process itself.</p>
<p>There was an episode on earlier this week with a young woman who pulled her hair out by the roots and ate it. She would wince in pain every time she did it but continued to pull hair. She wears a bandanna all the time to cover the bald spots on her head.</p>
<p>I saw the episode last night, too, about the hair dryer addict and the one who had been EATING TOILET PAPER for 23 years? Hello? They interviewed an MD who said that bowel obstruction might get to be a problem at some point. YES??? How is this woman surviving basically eating WOOD PULP??</p>
<p>I watched the household cleaner/tanning episode and canm’t watch any more. Too weird. I wil say that they show these folks going to a doctor/dentist/psychologist, so I guess at least at some level they are getting help.</p>
<p>It was interesting to hear about their histories. </p>
<p>The woman addicted to cats was an only child. She had cats as pets and she associated them with companionship. Later on, she was married for 17 years until her husband died suddenly of a heart attack. She took up with the cats again. During one of her counseling sessions, she said something like—“Cats don’t ever let you down.”</p>
<p>The woman addicted to eating household cleanser had been sexually abused as a young girl.
The cleanser eating started after that and she hinted that maybe it’s her way of cleaning herself from the inside out.</p>
<p>The tanning girl said that she loved hearing the complements about how good she looked when she first started tanning. She fed off of the initial compliments. </p>
<p>At the end of the show, they had a short update about the women. The woman addicted to cats had found homes for some of them. The woman addicted to eating household cleanser was continuing with counseling. The girl addicted to tanning was still tanning and didn’t seem to take the counseling too seriously.</p>
<p>Yes, these people all seem to have some sort of OCD and I think it says something terrible about how exploitive the media are making mental illness into a TV show (and I say this as someone who watches “Hoarders” with fascination while cleaning out my closet). I feel very sad that we’ve come to this.</p>
<p>The woman who was eating Comet made my skin crawl.</p>
<p>They do have the people see a therapist, but I thought it was interesting when the woman went to a dentist and was told ALL of the teeth on the top of her mouth need to come out, which equated to $19,000 in dental work. The dentist told the woman if she would quit the cleanser, she would do it for free.</p>