It’s the toxic compulsion that doctors claim could kill her. But this 19-year-old girl claims she is hopelessly addicted … to eating soap. A rare medical condition has left Tempestt Henderson, from Florida, eating up to five bars a soap a week – and washing powder too.
“I remember the first time I dipped my fingers into the washing powder,” she said.
“I dabbed the powder onto my tongue and it tasted so sweet, and salty – it just felt so right. I was hooked straight away.”
The nursing student says she knew eating soap was dangerous, but ignored the warning labels on the box in favour of licking the deadly powder daily, from the minute she woke up in the morning.
Soon she had moved onto licking the bubbles of soap in the shower, too, a habit that was getting her through up to five bars of soap a week.
After six months of eating soap, unhappy Tempestt decided to be brave and seek medical advice. She was diagnosed with a rare disorder called PICA, which doctors told her is characterised by an appetite for substances that are largely non-nutritive.
Sufferers have been known to compulsively eat metal, coins, chalk, batteries and even toothbrushes. It can often be caused by a mineral deficiency, which explains why pregnant women often crave eating coal when needing iron.
But in Tempestt’s case doctors believed the condition was brought on by stress.
“Things got really stressful for me when boyfriend, Jason, split up with me and left for college,” she admitted.
“He told me he was going to college in Kansas to study business. I begged him to give the long distance relationship a go, but he told me it was over. I was devastated.”
When Tempestt herself had to leave for college, hundreds of miles away from her family home in Florida, things took a turn for the worse.
Dr. Barton Blinder, the world’s authority on PICA, says that eating soap in these quantities could seriously affect Tempestt’s health.
But for Tempestt, therapy got to the bottom of her addiction to soap, and the cause of her PICA.
“I always knew I loved the smell of washing detergent.
“I used to love smelling the powder, but when life got so stressful I found only eating the soap would help,” she explained.
Psychologists have said that Tempestt most likely turned to soap eating as a comforting coping mechanism when she found herself away from her family.
The doctor gave Tempestt intensive Cognitive-behavioral therapy, or CBT, to give her replacement thoughts that will prevent her from compulsively reaching for soap.
She has also been encouraged to go for long walks, avoiding places where soap is present, like bathrooms and launderettes.
She added: “Doctors have encouraged me to talk about my issues, because they think my addiction is caused by me bottling things up.”
And for the teenager who used to take not one, not two, but three bottles of soap into the shower, she hasn’t eaten soap since September 2010.
When her mother found out about her daughter’s addiction, she ordered Tempestt to return home from college. It may have been a smart move as Tempestt admitted: “I just couldn’t face being back there, alone, with a campus full of soap.”
Today, she faces a long road to recover, but says she hopes she’ll never have to eat soap ever again.
“I suppose my Mum is secretly relieved that I was addicted to soap,” she admitted, “and not dangerous drugs or something.”
Source: The Mirror