Skin picking (sometimes called ‘Dermatillomania’ or ‘Excoriation Disorder’) is poorly understood and scarcely researched despite having a very significant impact on many people’s lives. I have completed a thesis and published two papers seeking to understand the experience of skin picking, with a view to informing therapy and identifying potential areas for intervention.

The Problem with Picking: Permittance, Escape and Shame in Problematic Skin Picking, 2021. This is my doctoral thesis, offering my in-depth analysis of interviews with seventeen individuals who identified as struggling with skin picking. The full thesis is available free of charge at the University of the West of England’s repository. Areas that I highlighted were:

• The Voice that Permits Picking: Cognitions Drive Picking and Undermine Resistance. Participants’ picking was driven by cognitions and circumstances that permit or accommodate picking, and that diminish the will to stop.
• Switching Everything Else Off. Participants described their picking as having dissociative qualities where they ‘zoned out’ away from senses and awareness. Picking often occurred alongside feelings of stress or distress, and the experience of ‘zoning out’ was often reported to give participants relief.
• I Worry About People Looking and Judging Me: Distress in how Picking is Seen. Much of participants’ distress seemed mediated by beliefs about the appearance of picking and its damage in the eyes of others.

Anderson, S., Clarke, V., & Thomas, Z. (2023). The problem with picking: Permittance, escape and shame in problematic skin picking. Psychology and Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice, 96(1), 83-100. This paper summarises the findings of my thesis. The shortening of it loses a lot of detail and quality, but it does make is a more digestible length! The paper has been published as open-access so is free to view.

Anderson, S., & Clarke, V. (2019). Disgust, shame and the psychosocial impact of skin picking: Evidence from an online support forum. Journal of Health Psychology, 24(13), 1773-1784. This paper considered the emotional and social impact of problematic skin picking by analysing the way it was talked about online. I noted that a sense of shame, disgust and need for concealment were central to the stories of many individuals. My study is published here and can be read in full here through The University of the West of England’s repository.

Skin Picking Therapy

For information about my therapeutic work with people who pick their skin, see here.

Home