Self harm amongst adolescents is far more common than you might think and it is primarily the domain of girls with the age of most risk being when they are between 13-15 with 9% of girls within this demographic having self-harmed sufficiently to present to hospital.

Self harm can take a number of forms of course and only immediate forms are usually included in statistics, such as cutting and posioning. Whilst most incidents of poisoning end up reporting to hospitals, many incidents of cutting are not reported, the implication being that the figures are probably much higher than the statistics suggest. One could also consider incidents of long term calculated harm, such as anorexia nervosa, which are not included.

Why do adolescents self harm? The answer is generally different for boys and girls.

For girls the major reason given is "to punish myself"
For boys it is "to kill myself"

Other reasons that are common are

"to find relief from a terrible state of mind"
"frighten someone"
"get attention"

Not surprisingly there is a close correlation between mental disorder and self-harm incidents . Most of the teenagers who are self harming presented with a psychological disorder, most commonly depression.

It is interesting to look at the family characteristics of the families in which these self harm events take place. The common theme was one of poor communication skills, with parents agreeing with statements such as

"We avoid discussing our fears and concerns"
"Planning family activities are difficult because we misunderstand each other"
"There is lots of bad feeling in the family"
"Making decisions is a problem for our family"

Additionally 32% of victims of self harm had experienced 3 or more stressful life events, 41% reported living with family discord and 32% were frequently punished.

In summary, these children were not living in loving, caring families who worked through their difficulties together. In particular 53% of the children who self-harmed agreed with the statement

"Since child was born parent had a separation due to marital difficulties or broken off a steady relationship"

There is a clear message here and that is that your childs psychological and emotional well-being is closely tied to the amount of love and stability they receive at home.

One final point, you may ask why boys don't feature as prominently in the self-harm statistics and the answer is simple, boys are much more fragile than girls and boys that are suffering frequently kill themselves. They are included in a different set of statistics.

If you wish to read more on this topic
click here for some detailed analysis by British Statistics
click here for recent research by Dr Karen Rodham published in Psychiatric Times.