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Caleb Wesley

Mr. Flores

ENG 1201

24 March 2022

Reasons of Self-Harm

To start, what exactly is self-harm? The way to explain self-harm would be in any way of

self caused injury or pain to cope, or deal with something. Rather this be anger, depression, or

stress. Some ways would be: cutting, biting, burning, hair pulling, and even just hitting your

hand on something.

In present day times, there are many reasons that people self-harm. It’s also not just

limited to any age or sex of people. Most people self-harm without a suicidal intent, this is

called non-suicidal self-harm. However there are also a lot of people who self-harm with the

intent of causing death. That being said, why do people self-harm? There are many reasons why

people self-harm: stress, emotions and mental health issues. Are there alternatives to self-

harming that do not inflict damage? The main alternative to help relieve people of stress, or to

calm down would be meditation.

Looking into the first source, “Predictors of Deliberate Self-Harm among Adolescents:

Answers from a Cross-Sectional Study on India.” by Debashree Sinha. This piece of information

goes into details about what are some of the many predictors of people self-harming.

Some of the predecessors to deliberate self inflicted wounds can be a number of things.

There was a study done among adolescents ages 10-19 boys and girls in India. They based their

results on things like, school status, parental abuse, internet access, working status, media
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exposure, involvement in fights and substance usage. The results showed girls who have access

to the internet are 50% more likely to have done deliberate self-harm (Sinha). Another big

factor was parental abuse. For the girls who have experienced parental abuse they have a 61%

increase in possibility of self-harm; while boys have a 49% increase for their chance in

deliberate self-harm (Sinha). They also mention that those who had, or have depressive

symptoms had a much higher increase in the chance of deliberate self-harm (Sinha).

Some of the major predecessors you could look for in a person would be, if they have

any history of parental abuse, any depressive symptoms, if they have been involved in fights

and if they have access to internet like media (Sinha).

The next pieces of information come from an article written by Katrina Witt. This article

goes into what can come from a person continuously self-harming. There are many different

risk factors that can come with repetitive self-harm. This also gives us a small glimpse into how

serious self-harm is; by giving numbers on how many patients are seen in hospitals after an act

of self-harm.

To start, hospital-treated self-harm patients are actually very common. In Australia

there are just over 7,500 patients up to 24 years old that are admitted into the hospital due to

self-harm every year (Witt). While in England and Wales there are normally somewhere around

25,000 people every year admitted into the hospital due to self-harm (Witt). Although these

seem like very large numbers of people, this is actually a very small number of the people that

actually self-harm. Most people will injure themselves and not go to a hospital. Which this is

understandable if the self inflicted wound was just them pulling hair or hitting a wall.

Unfortunately most people will cut themselves and never get treated for the wound.
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The majority of people will report to a hospital after the first repetition of self-harming.

Most people will report to a hospital within 12 months after their first episode of self-harm; this

can then turn into repetitive self-harm episodes (Witt). Repetition is more likely to occur with

females with a 55.4% chance while males have a 53.2% chance of repetitive self-harm (Witt).

People who are in or out of psychiatric treatment have a higher chance of beginning repetitive

self-harm (Witt).

The third source to look into was written by Soulat Khan. This piece goes more into what

physiological things can lead into self-harming habits.

One of the things that were found was family dynamics have a higher chance to

negatively affect the likelihood of self-harm (Khan). There was a second study done that found

that family related social issues can majorly influence emotional dysregulation which causes a

higher chance of NSSI or Non-Suicidal Self-Injury, in pre-adults (Khan).

There was a model created to better show why exactly people self-harm or begin self-

injurious behaviors. This model shows that this is a way to channel all the negative emotions

that one person may feel. They self-harm as a means to replace suicide itself. People use self-

injurious behaviors as an in between of life and death; to put it simply, to avoid complete self-

destruction (Khan).

The current populace of NSSI in the United States sits around 260 million. This means

there are between 36,400 and 1,560,000 end up engaging in self-harm every year (Khan).

According to World Health Orginization, for every act of suicide their is at least 10-20 acts of

self-harm. By this estimate alone, this means there are between 130,000 and 270,000 acts of
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self-injury in Pakistan annually (Khan). With rates of self-harm and even suicide like these, it

puts the overall likelyhood of someone self-harming tremendously higher.

This table shows for ages 18-35 the number of people who have self-harmed. For the

total number of people asked 54.4% were female and 45.6% were male. For the younger ages

the females were over represented, and finally started to balance at age 24. This table is from

the article made by Ketil Lunde.

Some of the biggest risk factors that lead to self-harm: for ages 18-24 it would be Sick

leave

and

people with lower levels of education; for ages 25-35 it was low income (Lunde).

This next article looks at how early on the rise of self-harm intentions begins to rise. The

article was written by Kwang Jung.

The study that they performed was involving the previous 5 years of self-harming

patients that were registered with hospitals. Among 588,549 injury patients, 8,400 reported

DSH (Deliberate Self-Harm). The rate of self-harm did not begin to rise until the age of 11 and
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reached age 16 which was equivalent to the DSH at 20-29 (Jung). However the early teenage

ages have a much higher mortality rate than the early adulthood years do (Jung).

Since the year of 2001, Korea’s suicide death rate is 7.2 per 100,000 people in 2014.

Worldwide suicide is the second most common cause of death (Jung).

After a person has an episode of self-harm the risk of suicide increases by 50-100 times

for the next 12 months after said episode (Jung). Exposure to others having a DSH episode can

influence other young immature adolescents to follow in their footsteps and also have DSH

episodes (Jung).

It is well established that the risk of suicide and suicide related behaviors are increased

during the teenage years; however there are very few studies showing the results for early

teenage years like 13 and younger. This is mostly due to the lack of people to use as a sample

and it’s not enough to make an accurate assumption of this age group. This is a very important

age to catch these early DSH acts or signs as these can quickly develop into suicidal attempts or

repetative DSH (Jung). Catching these early developments of not good things to start like self-

harm; we can then implement a prevention plan or an early onset therapy type.

The next article to look into was written by Ruth Wadman. This piece dives more into

the problems and different stressors that younger adolescents have to deal with.

Some of the things that can lead to a path of self-harm are often interpersonal stressors.

These could be family, friends, peers and romantic partners. This could also include bullying

(Wandman). Oftentimes self-harm patterns are much more severe when said person is

struggling with relational problems (Wadman).

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These studies strongly show that interpersonal stressors and relational problems

combined have a big influence on self-harm episodes (Wadman). This study also looks a little bit

further into detail like the severity, how frequently, the specificity and the sequencing of the

events (Wadman).

More times than not, the most effective manner to get people to stop self-harming is to

have friends or family to walk with you through your journey and to emotionally support you.

This has been found to be much more effective than any therapy or any type of care (Wadman).

The study that was conducted in this article written by Ruth Wadman; they specifically

looked at teens within the United Kingdom. Most of which reported their first incident of self-

harm between the ages of 10-15 years old. The reporting people from the samples also said

that they continued to self- harm for 1-7 years (Wadman). More than half of the people from

the samples said when their incidents were at their most frequent; they would self-harm daily,

57.1% of the sampled people said this (Wadman). 24.1% said it would only happen weekly

(Wadman). They also looked at the method that people used as a way of self-harm, the vast

majority said cutting (85.7%) while some others said they would overdose (Wadman).

The next article we’re going to look at was written by Jessica Peters. This article doesn’t

look so much into why people self-harm, but this instead looks more into does ones sexual

orientation in anyway effect a person likelihood to self-harm.

Looking into their results using their gender results. They broke up the groups into male,

female and other. The sexual orientaions are heterosexual adolencents or HA and Sexual

Minority Adolencets or SMA (Peters).

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These results are those who have had episodes of self-harm. The percentages given are

the percentage of the total sample for each category. For the females, the overall stat of 62%

have had at least some sort of episode. Females within the SMA category 63% have had some

sort of self-harm episode, and for those in the HA category it was 60% have had an episode

(Peters). For the males, the overall stat is 31%. For males in the SMA spot it’s 22% and those in

the HA category it was 40% (Peters). Finally for the transgender, or non-binary, the overall stat

is 8%; for those in SMA 15% and there was a 0% for HA (Peters).

Finally this article also splits their results by race. This was mostly a split between white

and hispanic. There were other races listed but most of their percentages were less than 10%.

The last source about adolescents self-harming was written by Kerri Kim. In this article

Kerri Kim goes on to talk about how emotional dysregulations can affect adolescents and self-

harming or having attempts at suicide.

According to a 2017 public health study, 17.2% of highschool teens have contemplated

suicide, 13.6% have reported to have a suicide plan (Kim). 7.4% have made some sort of a

suicide attempt; while 2.4% have made a suicide attempt that required medical treatment

(Kim).

Among adolescents there is a rate of 6%-30% in community samples of Non-Suicidal

Self-Injury or NSSI while among adults it’s a 4%-6% (Kim). Adolecene is the most important age

group to study because these would be the years to catch the earliest stages of self-harm either

with or without a suicidal intent (Kim).

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While there is a major difference between Suicidal Attempts or SA and NSSI, stats show

that roughly 40% of teens who have been involved in NSSI have at least one SA within their life

(Kim). Oftentimes NSSI is an indicator to later having SA. NSSI is also a tenfold risk for SA; even

after accounting for previous SA and depressive symptoms (Kim).

For this article their test they looked into SA, NSSI, and TDC which stands for Typically

Developing Control. Their results were for all their samples with a mean age of 15.4 years old.

The results were broken up by gender and race for each category. For females in the SA -

64.6%, females in NSSI - 84.0% and females in TDC - 59.5% (Kim). Now for the males results SA,

NSSI, TDC; 35.4%, 16.0%, 40.5% (Kim). Then looking at the race, white is almost 70% in SA, 98%

in NSSI and almost 80% in TDC (Kim).

The next piece that we move into is what is one of a few things you could do to try and

help fix or better control some of these things that cause people to start self-harming. The first

would be meditation, there is an article written by Laurent Valosek. This article goes more into

how mediation can improve overall mental health, it also mentions the levels stress the the

main party that is involved in self-harm this being adolescence.

An american psychology company reported that teens in school on a 10 point scale.

Most of the reporting teens reported an average of 5.8, which is higher than what adults

reported; the adults reported on average 3.9 (Valosek). 31% of the the reporting teens said

they often feel overwhelmed due to stress, while 36% reported feeling fatigued because of

stress (Valosek).
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Over a third of the reporting teens said they believe their overall stress has increased

within the last year, most of which also say they do not believe they are doing enough to

manage their stress (Valosek). Looking at just these stats, it explains one of the biggest causes

as to why teens are the worst age group in terms of self-harm.

The simple technique that is quite widespread is called meditation. This is just a simple

sitting with your eyes closed for 15 minutes twice a day (Valosek).

The final article to look at is a second technique to use. This article was written by

Babatunde Aideyan. This goes into something called breath work. There are many different

breathing things you can do to activate different nervous systems.

Breath work is something that can be done that causes the autonomic nervous system

or ANS to normalize its activity (Aideyan). In high stress situations, doing some breath work can

normalize ANS activity which allows you better manage stressful emotions (Aideyan). Breath

work is something to be looked at, as many of the breathwork techniques cause a relaxation

response and can ease the ANS to reduce overall stress (Aideyan).

Looking back through everything that we have gone over, the main group of people that

are seen having self-harm episodes are adolescents or teens. This is caused by stress and

mental problems. These stressors could be things like school, family, friends, relationships, or

social media. All of these can accumulate and drive one into repetitive self-muilation or even as

far as a suicide attempt or at least trying to put together a suicide plan. The best way to

counteract these issues is to catch the problems in the early stages and if it gets past the

beginning stages then look into meditation techniques and, or breathwork types.
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Work Cited

Sinha, Debashree, et al. “Predictors of Deliberate Self-Harm among Adolescents:

Answers from a Cross-Sectional Study on India.” BMC Psychology, vol. 9, no. 1, Dec.
2021, pp. 1–10. EBSCOhost, https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?
direct=true&db=edb&AN=154198700&site=eds-live.
Witt, Katrina, et al. “Population Attributable Risk of Factors Associated with the
Repetition of Self-Harm Behavior in Young People Presenting to Clinical Services: A
Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.” European Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, vol. 28,
no. 1, Jan. 2019, p. 5. EBSCOhost, https://doi.org/10.1007/s00787-018-1111-6.
Khan, Soulat, and Rukhsana Kausar. “Psychosocial Factors of Non-Suicidal Self-Injury
Among Adolescents and Young Adults.” Pakistan Journal of Psychological Research, vol.
35, no. 4, Dec. 2020, pp. 637–55. EBSCOhost,
https://doi.org/10.33824/PJPR.2020.35.4.34.
Lunde, Ketil Berge, et al. “Deliberate Self-Harm and Associated Risk Factors in Young
Adults: The Importance of Education Attainment and Sick Leave.” Social Psychiatry and
Psychiatric Epidemiology, vol. 56, no. 1, Jan. 2021, pp. 153–64. EBSCOhost,
https://doi.org/10.1007/s00127-020-01893-x.
Jung, Kwang Yul, et al. “Deliberate Self-Harm among Young People Begins to Increase at
the Very Early Age: A Nationwide Study.” JOURNAL OF KOREAN MEDICAL SCIENCE, vol.
33, no. 30, July 2018, p. UNSP e191. EBSCOhost,
https://doi.org/10.3346/jkms.2018.33.e191.
Wadman, Ruth, et al. “An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis of Young People’s
Self-Harm in the Context of Interpersonal Stressors and Supports: Parents, Peers, and
Clinical Services.” Social Science & Medicine, vol. 212, Sept. 2018, p. 120. EBSCOhost,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2018.07.021.
Peters, Jessica R., et al. “Sexual Orientation Differences in Non-Suicidal Self-Injury,
Suicidality, and Psychosocial Factors among an Inpatient Psychiatric Sample of
Adolescents.” Psychiatry Research, vol. 284, Feb. 2020, p. N.PAG. EBSCOhost,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychres.2019.112664.
Kim, Kerri L., et al. “Do Styles of Emotion Dysregulation Differentiate Adolescents
Engaging in Non-Suicidal Self-Injury from Those Attempting Suicide?” Psychiatry
Research, vol. 291, Sept. 2020, p. N.PAG. EBSCOhost,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychres.2020.113240.
VALOSEK, LAURENT, et al. “Effect of Meditation on Psychological Stress and Academic
Achievement in High School Students: A Randomized Controlled Study.” Education, vol.
141, no. 4, Summer 2021, pp. 192–200. EBSCOhost,
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https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?
direct=true&db=f5h&AN=151224783&site=eds-live.
Aideyan, Babatunde, et al. “A Practitioner’s Guide to Breathwork in Clinical Mental
Health Counseling.” Journal of Mental Health Counseling, vol. 42, no. 1, Jan. 2020, pp.
78–94. EBSCOhost, https://doi.org/10.17744/mehc.42.1.06.