HEALTH & ENVIRONMENT
Girl Talk: Why We Cut and Burn Ourselves
By Emma Pearse - WeNews correspondent
(WOMENSENEWS)--Corin (a pseudonym), a 19-year old teen
from central south Connecticut, can remember the first
time she cut herself. She was 15 and watching a Disney
movie. She picked up a razor and sliced into the veins
on her right foot.
"I discovered cutting by attempts at killing myself,"
Corin wrote in a recent e-mail to Women's eNews. "As
early as seventh grade I had been slicing at my veins,
with the intention of killing myself. I realized that
sometimes just cutting the skin away from the vein
made me feel better. And I began to do it more and
more often."
Corin is one of thousands of female teens logging on
to hard-to-locate Internet chat rooms. Many users keep
their chat room addresses private or for use by a
select few, yet some go so far as to create personal
Web sites. One such site, Self Injury: A Struggle, was
started by Gabrielle, a 19 year old, eager to share
her experience with self injury "to let others know
that they are not alone in their struggle," she
writes.
"It started as an attempt on my part to contribute my
voice and my opinions in the then growing awareness of
self-injury," she writes. "To use my voice to say that
self-injurers are valid individuals and that they are
more than a label."
Although no current data exist to prove their hunches,
analysts and clinicians say that the incidence of self
injury, which consists most commonly of behaviors such
as cutting, burning, and hair pulling, may be
increasing. They point to the emergence of a culture
in which it is acceptable--perhaps desirable--to talk
about it.
Research from the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention indicates that 1-in-4
adolescents in the United States thinks about suicide
each year and by the end of high school at least
1-in-10 has made a suicide attempt. In 2000, suicide
was the third leading cause of death among 15-to-24
year olds. Data from the National Institute of Mental
Health in Bethesda, Md., indicate that between 1995
and 2000, though four times as many men as women died
from suicide, women attempted suicide two-to-three
times more often than men.
Existing research indicates that during adolescence,
female teens are twice as likely as teen-age males to
suffer from depression, often with self injury as a
related behavior. The research also indicates that
people born in the last two decades are likely to
experience depression earlier in life than in previous
decades.
Dr. David Fassler, a child and adolescent psychiatrist
in Burlington, Vt., warns, however, that self injury
has been difficult to research due to its secretive
nature.
"For many years self harm was something that kids kept
to themselves," says Fassler. "Now it's something that
they're more likely to talk about."
Particularly Female Affliction
Linda Lebelle, director of Focus Adolescent Services
based in Salisbury, Md., agrees. She says that, among
professionals working with teens, most are aware that
cutting is a particularly female affliction and there
is a growing sense that, during the past few years,
more female teens have begun to call help lines to
talk about hurting themselves.
"Traditionally boys are able to express anger
outwardly more directly. Girls live in a much more
body-focused culture," says Dr. Wendy Lader, clinical
director of Safe Alternative, a hospital-based program
in Naperville, Ill., that caters exclusively to the
treatment of self injury.
"Skin is a bulletin board," Lader says. "They're
saying, 'Can you see how much pain I'm in?'"
Lader believes the behavior is increasing for several
reasons. "A lot of kids are feeling very invisible
these days," she says. "There are many reasons for
this--higher rates of divorce, more isolated
activities such as computers." Self harm makes their
experience more visible, she adds, and sometimes there
is the contagion effect. "Movies are showing beautiful
girls who are self injuring. There is a desire to
glamorize this."
Plenty of Cultural Attention
Last year, the movies "Secretary" and "Thirteen"
portrayed adolescent females cutting and burning
themselves in response to loneliness and family
neglect. Sexual abuse was hinted at, but never made
explicit. The play "Cut," adapted from the
four-year-old book of the same title by Patricia
McCormick, ran at a playhouse in Laguna Beach, Ca.
Local newspapers have covered the subject and Tracey
Gold's documentary, "Cutters: Self Abuse," ran last
year on the Discovery Health Channel. This month, one
of the main characters on a MTV series, "The Real
World, San Diego," Frankie, revealed a habit of
cutting.
Whatever their cultural cues, teens who cut themselves
are indicating a state of mind and perhaps a personal
history--tough childhoods, mental illnesses or peer
pressures--that call out for medical attention, says
Lebelle, from Maryland's adolescent services. "It
seems to be that a high proportion of kids who cut or
self injure have suffered some sort of trauma: abuse,
molestation or rape."
Both Fassler and Lader regard self harm as a symptom
rather than a diagnosis.
"The goal is to get people to recognize that self
injury is a clue," says Lader, the self-injury
specialist. "There's some kind of a feeling that they
don't want to experience. And they need to figure out
why at that moment they are having that impulse. And
rather than self medicate it with self injury, we want
them to understand what they are feeling, label their
feelings and challenge those irrational thoughts."
Impulse-Control Logs
Lader has her clients keep "impulse control logs" in
which they track every time they feel an impulse to
injure.
The teens who responded to a Women's eNews posting
openly described lives of enormous sadness,
little-understood emotions and an inexplicable
attraction to the thrill of self-inflicted pain.
Corin was just one of many girls who responded to a
posting on the Web site operated by Focus Adolescent
Services. Teens from the ages of 14 to 26, from
Colorado to Connecticut, wrote introducing themselves
with lines such as "Hi, my name is Abby. I am 17 and I
am a cutter."
Corin says she was sexually abused as a child and that
she has seen therapists, psychiatrists and been in a
hospital outpatient program for suicide attempts. She
writes she is grateful not to have had access to
weapons more serious than razors and Tylenol.
"All I have to say is that I am very lucky that my
parents don't keep a gun in the house," she writes. "I
am convinced I would not be here today if they did."
To read more postings from teens who harm themselves,
go to
Women's eNews: - "Female Teens Discuss Their Self
Injury": -
http://womensenews.org/article.cfm/dyn/aid/1789
Emma Pearse writes about pop culture and women's
issues from her home in New York City.
For more information:
SAFE Alternatives (Self-Abuse Finally Ends): -
http://www.selfinjury.com
Self Injury: A Struggle: -
http://www.self-injury.net
_
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