What do you think of when someone says “cannibalism”? Perhaps you think of Jeffery Dahmer or a praying mantis. There are more instances of cannibalism, like; the Donner Party, the crash of Uruguayan Air Force Flight. In animals, there are chimpanzees, lions, hippopotamuses, black widows, caecilians, and more.

Often times, we only think of cannibalism as people eating people for no apparent reason, much like Dahmer did. That is just not true. There are many cases of cannibalism, but we do not realize it. There is autophagia, the practice of biting or consuming one’s body. This type of cannibalism, when in humans, is seen as a mental health disorder, like schizophrenia, Bipolar Personality Disorder, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and more. Human symptoms are nail-biting, pulling hair, and chewing on fingers, in some cases biting their fingers can lead to amputation, but that is just extreme cases. Sadly, there is very limited research on this and cannibalism in general.

Sometimes, people report biting or eating themselves to stop bad thoughts; that is roughly 52%. Others, about 34%, say it is to prevent doing something they do not want to do. There is no single treatment that has good or permanent results.

Some cases of cannibalism are in survival instinct, often when no other food sources are available. There are many types of cannibalism; endocannibalism, when cannibals eat someone from inside their community; cannibalism, outside their community; and medicinal cannibalism, when people eat parts of the body as a form of medicine.

Cannibalism in folklore is very common. For instance, ‘Hansel and Gretel’, ‘Baba Yaga’, and, least commonly known, ‘Átahsaia’. There are other instances of cannibalism in mythology, like Cronus devouring his children to prevent being overthrown and the horrific acts of Atreus, who served his brother Threshes’s children. The myth of Tantalus, who served his son Pelops to the gods.

Although cannibalism does come with downsides–Illnesses are a big setback. One that you get explicitly from cannibalism is the Kuru disease. A deadly disease that infects the brain and is contracted when someone eats the human brain.