20
Teens: Cutting and Self-Injury
that I was certain. Now at an older age, she had found a way to hide her
past.” After recognizing the signs of someone who had likely cut herself
for years, Lohmann gently asked her about it. “‘Yeah, but it’s over now,’
she said with a reassuring smile.”
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Lohmann left the restaurant with the waitress’s scars weighing heavily
on her mind. “She was forever branded by her past,” Lohmann writes. “I
left the shop thinking ‘How can we keep our teens from harming them-
selves so they don’t have to hide their past when they get older? How can
we hear their silent cries for help?’”
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That was when Lohmann decided
to start a blog to help educate others about self-harming behaviors.
Difficult to Gauge
Lohmann’s reference to “silent cries” is a fitting descriptor for teens who
self-injure because they often keep their behavior a secret. They are so
ashamed of what they are doing to their bodies that they hide their self-
harm from family and friends, sometimes even their closest friends. This
secretiveness is a big reason why it is virtually impossible for mental health
experts to know exactly how many teens self-harm. Another factor that
adds to the uncertainty is that the study of self-injury is a young science;
research did not begin until the late 1990s, and no large-scale govern-
ment studies have been conducted
in the United States. American
teenagers are regularly surveyed by
federal health agencies to evaluate
risk-taking behaviors such as sexual
activity, smoking, and substance
abuse, but the same is not true of
self-harm. That is something that
researchers hope will change in the
not too distant future.
One study that focused on
self-harm behaviors among youth
was conducted by researchers from
Denver University in Colorado and Rutgers University in New Jersey. Pub-
lished in July 2012 in the medical journal
Pediatrics
, the study involved
665 youth between the ages of seven and sixteen. The researchers inter-
viewed the youth to inquire about whether they had engaged in any form
The methods used
for self-harming
differed based on
gender, with cut-
ting most common
among girls and
boys most often
hitting themselves.
“
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