Self-Injury: Why Young People Do It and Where to Go for Help
http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2011-03-07/self-injury-why-young-people-do-it-and-where-go-help
A surprising number of Americans seek relief from emotional pain through self-injury or mutilation. They cut, burn or strike themselves, often hiding their wounds beneath their clothing. These actions are not suicide attempts, but rather efforts to cope with psychological trauma and stress, and sometimes physical or sexual abuse. Up to a quarter of teenagers and young adults have intentionally hurt themselves at least once. And mental health experts are worried the Internet is causing the phenomenon to spread. We'll talk with psychologists who study and treat the condition and a young woman who has recovered.
Guests
Stephen Lewis
assistant professor of clinical psychology, University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada.
Lisa Diamond-Raab
a Washington, D.C., psychotherapist who has treated more than 700 young people for self-injury.
Rebecca X
a young woman who engaged in self-injurious behavior as a teenager and now works as a nurse; she requested that we use only part of her real name.
Comments
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If 25% of our teenaged and young adult population are cutting and hurting themselves this is not a dilemma that can be efficiently addressed using only case by case treatment. It is a structural problem rooted in cultural and material maladjustments and mistributions. We can't address it through our 100 million households, 80% of which are under economic seige. We can't address it through our school systems where teachers are being scapegoated and budgets cut. We can't address it through our churches where 50% deny scientific truths and are engaged in a politics of hatred and fear. We can't address it through a media thoroughly commercialized, often hyper-violent, and anti-informational for reasons of social control and profit. Self-mutilation is something that is common in rat experiments where artificial scarcity and intense anxiety are induced. No relief will be found until the majority of citizens demand their human rights and personhood returned. That will eventually provide relief, but not before the privileged side induces intense hurt before they are overcome. Cutting and self mutilation result from social isolation and anxiety that doctors and social workers can't fix for the majority of poor and powerless people. The fix is for the few with resources, and it is temporary.
Thank you so much to your wonderful guests for addressing the important issue of self-injury!
There are so many myths about why individuals engage in self-injury and far too many health care professionals, family members, and friends believe that it's an attempt to manipulate or garner sympathy. The truth is, of course, much more complicated.
FBPDA and many other wonderful organizations are dedicated to helping people who self-injure. Help really is available.
Most respectfully,
Amanda L. Smith
Florida Borderline Personality Disorder Association
As a relatively rational woman who has struggled with emotional expression my whole life, I understand self-injury on a very real level. We could discuss all the reasons for self-injury, but I want to stress the importance of how we use our brains. To me, climbing out of the cycle of self-injury was directly related to understanding how to use my brain. Understanding that the impulses I was feeling were not generated by my lack of worth but a signal route in my brain that was on the fritz helped me re-frame the issue as one of chemistry, habit and action rather than of being fundamentally flawed.
Books that I suggest for people who hurt themselves and who want to stop:
Stumbling on Happiness
The Brain That Changes Itself
Get Out of Your Mind and Get Into Your Life
If you self injure, I can tell you that you CAN stop. If I can tame those storms, I believe you can too. It's an addiction like any other.
If you're young and doing it coz it's 'cool', please be really careful... when you start this habit, it's a hard one to stop. Like heroin, it's better to never start.
You are not broken. You are not destined to suffer. Change your brain... it's all in how thoughts get you to take action against yourself. Find the pause between impulse and action and widen it. That's the way in.
Blessings on us all - coz hurting yourself instead of expressing yourself sucks.
But it is a fact that the average injurer is 14 female; there are mostly females with tendencies to eating disorders. Males tend to have more anger issues.
A lot of times there are underlaying issues including sexual abuse. There are different type of cutters, ones which try to manage trauma and others who tie it into a social aspect.
Thank you for having this on...
I cannot put all my emotions to words, but I have been SI free for 11 years, but even after all this time, I still only take every day as it comes. The bubble inside my chest isn't as strong as it once was, but the emotion is still there.
I found that the greatest help for me was to educate myself about SI, the more I learned, the stronger I became over myself.
Thank you...
It is a little funny listening to a radio show on this when I look back on my own experience with self-injury. I remember starting around the age of 13 and what gave me the idea to start was a 20-20 (or some other news report) on cutting.
On a side note, I don't do it any more, but I am not sure the feelings to do it ever completely went away. I suppose I just found different ways to manage how I was feeling in a more socially acceptable way. However, when I was younger, if people found out I felt so criticized for my actions that it drove me to cut rather than got me seek help or have help provided (times may have changed, but this was my experience).
I'd be curious to know if this phenomenon is documented in other cultures outside of the US.
I wish you would concentrate more on discussing alternate coping strategies instead of focusing almost morbidly on the acts.
I want to ask if picking cuticles is on the spectrum of cutting? I have picked my cuticles bloody since my childhood, copied my mom. I even started on my toes.
I am not aware that I do it in response to stress or that it is a coping mechanism but I realize now, in my 40s, that it really is an addiction. It must serving some purpose for me. I find it almost impossible to stop though I might realize that I do stop for a few months but then notice that I have started again.
I can’t help but think of the “Tiger Mom” and wonder what role that mentality parenting style plays into the pressure put on kids who end up self-harming.
I am a loyal listener and member of my local station WLRN. My daughter began cutting in middle school 12 years ago. Fortunately, I had heard an NPR program with dialogue about "cutting". I knew this was not suicide and was an addiction as devastating as it was. I familiarized myself with source available at the time to help us. Even with psychological help the practice reappeared several times. Over the years the practice stopped and she has turned her efforts to help others. Our story is much more complicated however I say this to qualify my comment.
For some reason I am bothered by the "self injury" description rather than "cutting" although I know there are other methods. The political correctness is disturbing. The kids are known and identify with the description of "CUTTER". Please at least mention this. Rebecca just used the verb form of the word. Thank you.
I have been a cutter since I was a freshman in high school. There were many people in my life who noticed or saw - although my parents never did and I never told anyone other than my many therapists - but no one ever said anything or forced me to get help. I only ever sought help on my own terms and in my own time. The people in my life I think did not have the tools to understand the impulse and so they ignored it, wrote it off. This experience made me feel increasingly embarrassed by the behavior. I am 27 years old, and I have never had a relationship. I can say that a big part of this circumstance is fear that no one wants to get that close to someone who has such a thing inside of them, that if they knew they could not handle it, so why take that risk?
I vastly agree that this cannot be treated on a case by case basis and much like more emphasis has been placed on speaking to all children about bullying this issue needs to be dealt with en-mass as well as individually.
I don't think this is just a young adult issue.
Admittedly. .I have had a history of this in college. I think that it is a societal issue. I think a lot of the pressures of the modern world and having no real outlets.
Someone's comment saying that there is "help" .. I think that this is not true. With Insurance companies not covering decent mental health.. makes it hard.
We have a stigma and disgust in our culture against this kind of behavior.
It is considered a sign of "weakness".
Very helpful program for learning about mental health issue. Sadly, the MD's (psychiatrists) are not encouraged by insurance companies to provide talk therapy - rather to offer drug therapy. See recent article in NY Times re Dr. Levine. Many people need contact - not drugs alone or at all.
I listen with great interest to the topic today. I have been having tattoos from an early age, and have always felt that it was because I "deserved the pain" (I was emotionally and sexually abused by an alcoholic father) - and I had an Ah-Ha moment while listening.
Could it be that I had the tattoos (instead of cutting), but it did the same thing emotionally? I have since stopped having them, out of getting therapy and dealing w/the emotions of growing up abused.
Perhaps other people that have gotten tattoos feel the same?
Thank you for bringing this topic into the forefront.
I'm curious about the incidence of SI in the mature adult population. Being that I'm in my 50's and still self-mutilating, without insurance, I'm not sure that there would be any available treatment programs that I could afford to avail myself of. (Dallas,TX)
By the way, I've been picking my skin on my fingers/thumbs since I was around 13-15 years old. It's just been such a compulsive detrimental activity that I've wasted so much of my life on.
Thank you for addressing this subject on your show.
Just wanted to add, it's not a condition only of teenagers.
I was in my forties when my best friend was dying of leukemia...there were other issues going on also and one day I found myself with this overwhelming desire to cut myself.
I had never experienced that before so I was quite taken aback.
I do not personally know someone who self-injures, but I am involved in a way. My nephew broke up with his high-school girlfriend, and she began cutting herself. The parents of this young lady immediately started blaming my nephew, and actually want to have a meeting with my sister and brother-in-law and my nephew. My sister has suggested that the girl needs to get therapy and stop trying to lay the blame on everyone else. What is my sister's responsibility when it comes to this young lady
What about sports like football that involve constant injury? Is the superjock who plays every sport with great intensity also self-inflicting injury?
Obsessive body piercing has to be related to cutting, No?
As a former SI teenage girl, the examples being discussed on the show sound too "ideal" -- for me, and I feel that for many American middle class girls out there, a huge part of the problem has/had to do with suppressing communication, hiding feelings from parents, feeling that parents expect perfection and a certain ideal only. If my parents had found out, the last thing they would've done would in anyway "reveal" the problem to the outside such as seeking help or counseling... a vicious cycle of feeling trapped and unheard. Please include some advice or discussion to help parents listening who are driven by family image and everything appearing perfect.
As a self harming person starting in my pre teens... I find a lot of the opinions expressed today are lacking large scale research or facts, or, lack the association of how pleasure is sometimes associated with pain.
Other than the potential danger, is this behaviour always associated with a cry for help emotionally?
What about adrenalin junkies who harm themselves on occasion for the rush. How common is this behaviour?
I have counselled gay youth on this issue... I have found that quite a few teens and young adults do this to avoid having sex or to be naked in front of another person. Often, they are not emotionally ready for an intimate relationship and this behaviour almost guarantees they will keep your clothes on.
I started cutting myself beginng at 12 1/2. Now I think it may have something to do with my recent diagnosis of Asperger's syndrome.
I cut when I was frustrated and angry at myself . I was troubled, with a mother that we have found out has bi-polar and a father who probabaly had AS also.
My parents smoked and drank from before aI was concieved until after I left home.
I continued with cutting and hitting my fist on brick walls, until about 10 years ago. I am now 64.
I didn't know anyone else who did this and I cut mainly on the thighs because I was ashamed of this. My mom would sometimes comment on my hands, but never either knew or said anything about the cutting.
It help, I had relief. If someone could get back to me about this. thanks
I do the same thing, maa. Any loose piece of skin has to be picked off, immediately. Which usually leaves a bloody mess :(
I have had some success with always carrying cuticle cream but the urge to pick is always strong. I believe this is a form of OCD, which runs strong in my family.
You may find this link helpful
http://www.skinpick.com/nails-cuticles-picking
Cutting has been around for thousands of years. It is specifically forbidden in the law of Moses; referring to it as a heathen practice. It is also referred to in the New Testament in Mark 5:5. There is nothing new about it.
Thank you for the link to this site. I've never felt as if I could stop this terrible addiction/habit of mutilating myself. I want to stop and will begin researching this in earnest.
Robert
Parents, please read "Helping Teens Who Cut, Understanding and Ending Self-Injury" by Michael Hollander, Ph.D. He is affiliated with McLean Hospital, the premier mental health hospital in the Boston area, where he runs a DBT, dialectical behavioral therapy, program for teens with great success. Parents are encouraged to attend their own group and practice acceptance and coping strategies. There is information about the DBT program on McLean Hospital's website. My teen joined his DBT program and it helped immensely. After the intensive multi-week program, teens attend a weekly reporting/support group for 6 months.
This is such a great topic. I was diagnosed with an easting disorder in the 8th grade, when I was 13 which once I entered high school (14), I began using marijuana and cutting shortly after. I was never exposed to cutting previously but my closest friend was doing it - so I thought I would give it a try. Defining why you did something in the past can be tricky. At the time, honestly, it felt good. Though I couldn't have put it into words then, my family never communicated about emotions - or anything really. Therefore, I was someone who had immense difficulties communicating verbally. Luckily, I am very artistic (and I will argue that everyone is!) - and had ways to express myself through painting and drawing and then sculpture. The interesting thing is, as a caller also related to, was that I saw my cuts as beautiful - I liked how they looked and also anticipated the scars. Growing up, kids generally treasure their scars and I had a similar appreciation for them then. I would also agree with the speaker that this became addictive - as most people, I am curious by nature. Looking back now, I also question our education system - along with most of us being curious, young people especially are extraordinarily capable intellectually - but I feel that our education system is flawed in that we are not challenged. Unfortunately, I was not being engaged at home either - add this in with my intense curiosity and a need to express myself but not sure on how to do so or who to do so with, and then, go ahead and mix in the largest influx of hormones I would experience throughout my life... and put all this into the setting of being in high school - where hundreds of other teenagers are experiencing similar challenges.
A person called in asking if we consider our hormones in the equation of why we cut. I wish this would have gotten more attention - because this is LARGely overlooked in our culture: our biology. I am just 22 now and have graduated from college and now pursue other curiosities such as our gender specific neurology. Regardless, both boys and girls are flooded with hormones right around when we enter high school. This is something that, in my opinion, should be considered more heavily in learning how to approach these problems and problems like them.
My self infliction and drug experimentation was something I hit hard and fast - and by the end of my freshman year was out of. Something that did help me tremendously is running. In no way was running simple for me in the start - in fact, it was almost torturous - but gradually, you improve, and the results are tangible and feel. so. good. You also improve your health, have more energy, and get outside while making time for yourself