Woman addicted to drinking her urine

Some people like to drink soda, others water – but for 53-year-old Carrie, she prefers to drink her own urine. Carrie, who will be featured on Sunday’s season finale of “Strange Addictions” at 10 p.m. on TLC, said she has been addicted to drinking urine for more than 4 years. She drinks about 80 ounces of her urine each day – sometimes by glass, sometimes using a Neti pot to drink it nasally. “When you are nasal drinking, the pain is different than any pain you’ve experienced,” said Carrie, who lives in Colorado Springs, Colo. Dr. Keith Ablow, a psychiatrist and contributor to Fox News Channel, who has not treated Carrie, said she is ultimately suffering from a form of Pica disorder, an umbrella term for people who eat inorganic things, like dirt or wood. “I think what this women is describing is really a form of obsessive compulsive disorder, where she has a compulsion to do something that has nothing to do with nutrition and that she probably thinks about a good deal of the time in an obsessive way,” Ablow said. Carrie said most people in her life don’t know about her addiction, but in Sunday’s episode, she will tell her friend Denise. “I drink almost all the urine that comes out of my body,” Carrie said in the trailer. “All of it?” Denise asked. “It tastes like water for me,” Carrie responded, adding she will put the urine in her eyes, use it to brush her teeth and save it to rub aged urine on her skin. Ablow said that Carrie is likely addicted to drinking to her urine because it allows her to not think about the stressful things in her life. “(Pica) has been linked to lots of things, like parental neglect and disorganized families,” Ablow said. “(Drinking urine) shows a real failure shows a real failure between what represents you as an individual and what waste products to be discarded – she probably has guilt over ridding herself of her bodily functions.” Ablow said he had a patient who used to repeatedly inject herself with dirt and would present to the hospital with infections. Ablow discovered the woman felt ‘soiled’ because of previous sexual abuse. Antibiotics and therapy was helpful in treating her.