Dean, a 14-year-old girl, has a 3-inch by 8-inch scar on her hip.
It’s usually numb with nerve damage but when pressed, it sometimes flares up with shooting pain. Every time the weather gets warm enough to go to the beach, it makes her feel embarrassed.
Dean made this scar, one small act at a time. It’s not her only one.
“I would try to stay clean, and then relapse, and then try to stay clean, then relapse,” she said.
Dean, who prefers to remain anonymous, has struggled with self-harm in various ways since the age of 9, she told The Epoch Times.
Dean said she started to self-harm at a time when she felt stressed and lonely. Some of her friends had moved away, and self-harm felt like a way to exert control in a chaotic situation. Then, it became an addiction.
“About the time when I was 12, I started realizing it was kind of an addiction at that point,” Dean said.
Dean’s addiction to self-harm was bolstered by her time on the internet, she said. Websites she spent time on taught her that self-harm was normal.
“I was hearing, these kinds of people have done it. So it’s clearly not too horrible,” she said.
Social media pages that publicize self-harm have often inadvertently led vulnerable young people into self-harm, according to psychologists. Although many of these social media pages are officially against self-harm, some of the jokes, stories, and advice in them tend almost to celebrate it.
More Hurt Than Ever
Recent statistics suggest that among young women and girls, self-harm is an increasingly large trend that might affect up to 30 percent of teens. According to psychiatrist Dr. Jess Shatkin, about 15 to 20 percent of young Americans have self-harmed at least once.“Most people who self-harm do it for a brief period of time and don’t continue,” he said. “There’s a lot of experimentation, and relatively less follow-through.”
However, these numbers aren’t a good estimate, he said. Most self-harm isn’t reported.
The rise in self-harm follows a general trend of increasing mental illness that has been true since the 1940s, Shatkin said. This trend isn’t because of changing medical definitions or diagnostic criteria.
“The criteria by which we diagnose, symptomatically, people with depression and anxiety have not changed dramatically since 1980. Yet we’ve seen rates go up and up,” he said.
This high number doesn’t mean self-harm is “normal,” according to psychiatrist Dr. Pamela Cantor. It means that young people today are in a place of terrible mental suffering.
“I have more phone calls now than I’ve ever had,” she said.
Not only are there more calls about self-harm, but the kids making the calls are also younger, Cantor said. She’s received calls about suicidal children as young as 6 and 7.
Into the Rabbit Hole
Dean got deeper into self-harm by going online. When she was struggling with suicidal thoughts, depression, and anxiety, she started researching these topics by looking on Reddit and Pinterest.“I was going on to more of the forums and seeing how people did it, how it ‘helped’ them. The poetry people write about how it feels: It seemed logical,” she said. “And it seemed like, ‘If I want to stave off suicide, this seems like a good way to do it.’”
Dean said that among friends her age, people often “try” self-harm to see if they can do it.
“It is pretty common for people to try it and experiment with it,” she said. “But I don’t know how many people latch on to it.”
If Dean’s friends see her scars, they tend not to tell the adults in her life, she said. Instead, they encourage her to look for support from hotlines or from people online.
“A few have said, ‘If you promise me you’re trying to get better, I won’t tell any adults. I won’t tell the counselor, or I won’t tell any teachers,’” Dean said. “But usually what they say is, ‘Reach out online, call a hotline if you need it.’”
Dean said that if she had known about the many long-term effects of self-harm scars, she wouldn’t have hurt herself. Her scars itch, sometimes sting, and other times feel numb. When people see them, they raise awkward questions and difficult conversations.
“I don’t think I would have done it,” she said. “There are just the little things you don’t think about.”
According to Cantor, teenagers like Dean are often more influenced by what their peers around them do than older adults are.
“Their identity is not as well-formed,” she said of young people.
Young people wear the same shoes, dress the same way, and all try to fit in because they often don’t know who they are yet, Cantor said.
When kids like Dean enter environments where self-harm is seen as normal, their perception of what they should do can shift dramatically, she said. Participating in online communities that celebrate self-harm can often cause problems for young people.
Competing to Be Worse
Ruth, 20, is a mechanical engineer, judo practitioner, avid reader, and committed Christian.She has also been struggling with self-harm for about two years. It became the way she dealt with stress.
“I don’t remember why I initially did it the first time,” she said. “I wanted to see that I was able to do this. It was like a challenge.”
Ruth’s explanation for her behavior is complex, with a web of feelings that tend to conflict. In the moments before she hurts herself, she often finds that some part of her screams at her not to do it. But at the same time, she wants to do it anyway.
“Even when I’ve been the most into self-harm, it is still somewhat difficult to actually hurt yourself,” she said.
Ruth said that the most difficult part of her self-harm addiction is that it has made her feel distant from God.
“My relationship with God is a holy thing that I wish I really hadn’t messed with,” she said. “And I kind of, I broke it all down, and I have to build it back up again.”
Ruth said she has long struggled with suicidal urges and self-harm, but social media has made her fight against self-destructive urges more difficult.
Some of Ruth’s struggle with self-harm comes from Reddit pages. She shouldn’t be on the self-harm page r/madeofstyrofoam, but she still is, she said. Three other popular Reddit pages on self-harm are r/selfharm_memes, r/selfharm and r/selfharmscars. Many posts on these pages normalize and glorify self-harm.
Many of these Reddit pages use a series of euphemisms that dehumanize the body. Lacerations are “yeeting,” the white flesh just beneath the skin is “styrofoam,” and “beans” are the bubbles of fat deeper underneath the skin.
“One of the rules on the subreddit is no glorification of self-harm,” she said of the subreddit r/madeofstyrofoam. “But there’s 100 percent glorification of self-harm. It’s like a competition,” Ruth said of her experience there.
In self-harm subreddits, people often try to outdo each other with stories of how much they’ve hurt themselves, Ruth said. It becomes a competition.
“We all want to have it worst. It’s a very human thing,” she said.
The Hurt Leading the Hurt
The self-harm subreddits are something between a support group, a joke page, a hobby club, and a public performance. And some of the participants don’t want to get well.“Personally, I don’t want to get better,” one Reddit user on r/selfharm_memes said.
Another post on r/selfharm_memes joked about bandaging self-harm wounds with socks rather than bandages. No one advised the original poster on how to quit.
On r/selfharm_memes, users are allowed to post photographs of self-harm weapons as long as they are part of a meme.
In one post on r/madeofstyrofoam, a Reddit user asks the subreddit for help on a problem. After harming himself at school enough for the injury to be obvious, the user learned that his dad was going to meet him in the next few minutes. The user asked the subreddit for advice on how to hide the injury so his dad wouldn’t find out.
Instead of advising the self-harmer to tell his dad and get help, Reddit participants advised him on how to hide the injury.
“Maybe make a small cut on your finger and then ask for a bandaid, go to the bathroom, and try to cover as much as possible,” one commenter advised.
“Paper tissue is a bad idea since it can get stuck in the wound,” another commenter advised.
But no one told the user to open up to the people around him in his life about his self-harm problem.
The subreddit for r/madeofstyrofoam’s rules say, “What you write is your own business.”
“i like blooood,” a post on r/selfharm is titled.
The rules on r/selfharm prohibit “glorifying self harm.”
For someone such as Ruth, these jokes and images strengthen parts of herself that she wants to defeat.
“Some days, I’m very proud of my scars,” Ruth said. “Some days, I’m definitely not proud of my scars, because I’m 20, and these are going to be on my body probably my entire life.”
The Epoch Times contacted Reddit about its policy on pages that have people glorifying self-harm, but has yet to receive a response.
According to psychologist Dr. Terri Apter, if a community with the same problem isn’t working to get better, they tend to make each other worse.
Fighting to Recover
No matter the cause, when teens develop an addiction to self-harm, the addiction often remains long after the original reasons disappear.
Amy, a 19-year-old from Tennessee, started self-harming in middle school because she had a lot of friends who did it, she said.
“It later became pretty much an addiction,” she told The Epoch Times. “At first, it was mainly just a way of trying to be cool with my friends, and then I became reliant on it.”
Amy said that as a kid, she often felt like her feelings of depression weren’t valid. But actual physical wounds gave her a “reason” to feel bad.
Amy said that many of her friends who self-harmed also had their addiction start after they learned about self-harm from friends or online.
But after young people get addicted to self-harm, it’s not easy to stop. When Amy stopped being friends with the person she had originally tried to impress with self-harm, she said she realized self-harm wasn’t cool. It was horrible.
By then, however, she found that she couldn’t stop.
“Freshman year-ish would be when I was like, ‘Okay, this is not cool anymore. Stop!’” she said. “And then I realized I can’t stop.”
Amy stopped self-harming when she got a seasonal job that was so exhausting she didn’t have time to self-harm, she said. After the job ended, she chose to stay clean.
“I was like, I don’t really want to throw away this progress that I’ve made, and it kind of just went on from there,” Amy said.
Today, Amy is proud to be at about 450 days without self-harm, she said.
To help keep herself from self-harming, Amy has familiarized herself with the tools she once used for self-harm. This practice has helped her think of the objects as tools again, rather than as weapons.
How to Help
Internet forums aren’t the best way to help people who struggle with self-harm, psychologists say.“People should take self-harm behavior seriously and should have the courage to ask questions if they’re suspecting a loved one is self-harming,” said Dr. John Bradley, president of the Massachusetts Psychiatric Society.
People who self-harm have a high risk of committing suicide, he said. They aren’t harming themselves to get attention. They’re harming themselves because they don’t have good coping strategies for stress. Self-harm often worsens over time.
“It certainly can become addictive,” Bradley said. “Its effects can be reinforcing in their own right and create this addictive pattern.”
Parents and friends can watch for physical signs of self-harm like strange injuries or a tendency to hide a nonprivate body part, Bradley said. But these signs of self-harm can often be disguised.
It’s harder to disguise the anxiety, depression, or stress that usually accompany self-harm, he said. If someone is hurting, people around them should ask them what’s happening.
“There are many effective treatments for emotional dysregulation and self-harm behaviors that can help people a great deal,” Bradley said.
