Self-harm and College Students

I've often talked to patients in community mental health centers and psychiatric hospitals who were what we call "delicate self-cutters" or SIB patients (self-injurious behavior). The reason for the self-harm has varied little and patients told me they had a sense of relief afterward. But until now professionals may not have known how prevalent this behavior might be.

A recent study which appears in the June 2006 issue of Pediatrics (117, pp. 1939-1948) looked at a sample of 2,875 students in two universities in the Northeastern United States. The universities are not named for reasons of confidentiality, which is the usual procedure in this type of research.

Originally, 8,300 students were picked at random and asked to participate. Of that number, 3000 students did take the survey but, also as is usual, incomplete questionnaires were not included in the calculations. The results, however, are of interest.

Seventeen percent of the students admitted to deliberately harming themselves and of that number, 75 per cent had harmed themselves more than once. For self-harmers, therefore, it is usually not an isolated incident.

The researchers also found that self-harmers were experiencing higher levels of distress, had signs of eating disorders and a history of three types of abuse: physical, sexual or emotional. The forms of self-harm included cutting, pinching, scratching, burning themselves, ripping or pulling their hair or skin. I have seen young female patients engaged in extraordinary forms of self-harm which ran from breaking their arms in doors to cutting their arms with razor blades and burning themselves with hair dryers. These patients, however, were in psychiatric hospitals, not college.

A secret form of self-abuse, respondents who had told someone about the abuse usually told mental health professionals rather than their medical doctors or other medical workers. The researchers indicated that, just as is done in the case of alcohol abuse, physicians and healthcare professionals need to begin asking about self-harm if something seems to indicate it.

Related Topics: WebMD Video: The Teen Brain, When Scab-Picking, Cutting Becomes Addictive

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