But while the condition is usually nonfatal -- most of the effects come from social problems resulting from bald patches -- doctors say those interventions are crucial.
Christina Pearson described her 20-year ordeal as a painful period of thinking she was alone, "thinking I was the world's biggest freak."
For her, pulling her hair out and then chewing on the root (which doctors say is typically not enough to result in an accumulation of hair in the stomach) was an irresistible compulsion.
"I used to cry watching my hand go to my head, and there were times in my 20s that I would tie my hands together."
Ultimately, Pearson learned more about her disorder and got help. Eighteen years ago, she founded the Trichotillomania Learning Center, where she is now executive director, educating people about the condition to prevent the problems she had.
"There's not a lot of thought involved in this. It's more like scratching an itch. It's more like chewing gum," Pearson said. "It would induce a trance for me that would last for hours, and then the next day I would be absolutely traumatized.
"You cannot imagine why you're doing this and why you can't stop. It doesn't make sense."
While cases like the one in Mumbai are not common among trichotillomania sufferers, several occur every few years and they can be fatal when they result in bowel obstruction.
Last year, Dr. Sri Komanduri, a gastrointestinal surgeon then at Rush Medical Center in Chicago and now at nearby Northwestern Memorial Hospital, removed a 10-pound mass of hair from an 18-year-old woman, writing an account of it in the New England Journal of Medicine.
"Essentially, the entire stomach was kind of engulfed with this thing," he told ABCNews.com.
While people often swallow unusual objects such as coins, Komanduri said that the mass of those objects keeps them from accumulating in the stomach.
"Things like hair don't have much substance or weight to them, and they tend to pool," he said.
He noted that surgery was not the typical solution for patients, as most of the hair accumulations could be removed by pushing it out during an endoscopy or using other nonsurgical techniques.
He said that in the past 10 years he has seen five cases of hair accumulation in the gut, but this was the first time surgery was needed. He also noted that the masses of hair are not typically found until some other problem forces doctors to look in the stomach.
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