During my mum’s second marriage, in my later teens, I was living in a stressful environment where domestic violence was present, and in a house with an occasional flea problem leading to flea bites – crater-like sores covered my arms and legs regularly.

There are still days in my adult life when I may not realise I’m scratching, but I know that I’m nervous in my body to the point where I need a repetitive movement that grounds me, and scratching becomes the first or last resort depending on the day. There have been bouts of suicidal ideation as an adult because I did not want to be alive in the mind and body that I occupy. The correlation between my dermatillomania and my OCD being at its most active when I am at my most suicidal is not a coincidence.

I can understand some people’s need to keep the two disorders separated. Not everyone with dermatillomania has OCD; some people pick their skin as a connection with body dysmorphia or attention deficit disorder (ADHD). Not everyone with OCD has dermatillomania or any one of the other BFRBs. However, for me, it is important that I don’t compartmentalise the two because I don’t want to place my mental health in a binary. Doing that forces a linear narrative of “first there’s A, and now there’s B” to make my mental wellness journey palatable for able-bodied and/or neurotypical people to understand, and that isn’t fair.

I am not cured of my excoriation disorder or OCD by any means. I am only learning how to live with it and manage it.

“This is how I’m learning to live with dermatillomania”