Your Signal
Pica
12 min read
Also known as: pica syndrome · picacism · eating inedible substances · pica disorder · allotriophagy · geophagia · eating earth · craving for indigestible matter · pica eating disorder · unusual food cravings · pica behaviour
Your Body Is Speaking
Pica is a compulsion that cannot be explained — at least not with ordinary categories of hunger. A child chews on chalk, on paper, on their own hair. A pregnant woman secretly eats earth from a flowerpot or licks stones. An adult chews ice cubes until their teeth ache, swallows sand or paint flakes from the wall. Nobody wanted it this way. It just happens. And it belongs to the symptoms most heavily surrounded by silence — out of shame, out of incomprehension, out of fear of being seen as strange.
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