Trichotillomania and the DSM IV


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Hair-plucking, as reported by Laurel Braitman in Cabinet, via the March 14, 2011, New Yorker, is listed under “Impulse-Control Disorders Not Otherwise Classified” in the American Psychiatric Association Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV. “She has observed enough ‘photos of mice and rats with little bald spots on their heads, reverse mohawks, or hairless facial patches shaped like tiny “Phantom of the Opera” masks’ to convince her that not just humans pluck and that plucking by other animals can be triggered by many things, ‘including obsessive thoughts.'”


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