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 Health & Beauty | October 2007 
Self Mutilation: Some Teens Hurt Themselves to Deal With Emotional Pain
 Ashley Meeks - Las Cruces Sun-News
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| | A high school student, who asked to remain anonymous, points to the scars on her left arm Friday where she said the deeper scars are spots where she attempted suicide. (Sun-News/Shari Vialpando) |
Las Cruces - Everyone knows that skin naturally recoils from the sharpness of a razor.
But sometimes, it doesn't. Not everybody knows that.
Like the 14-year-old with the horizontal slashes across her arm, with the scars on her ankles and knees from sixth grade.
She is one Mayfield High School freshman, among an estimated 13 percent to 20 percent of adolescents, the majority female, who have burns, scratches and self-inflicted cuts like hers. The Sun-News has honored her request for anonymity.
An estimated 50 percent of those who self-injure are at risk of suicide. For her, it started with those dark thoughts, in fifth grade. It progressed to self-punishment, cutting her knees with disposable razors - what is technically termed impulsive, repetitive elf-mutilation syndrome - when she felt guilty after family arguments.
"I just thought maybe if I felt pain, it would teach me to learn a lesson," she said. She began to feel a drug-like release from her emotional pain. Endorphins. "It turned into a relief thing."
It progressed to sewing needles under her skin. Then she started cutting her wrists.
"I was always afraid, before, that I would hit a vein. It got to where I just stopped caring," she said. "If I died, I died."
Take the teenage pressure of a group of friends ditching class to do shots of Mad Dog 20/20 in a shady arroyo as a best-case scenario.
Take your first love leaving you for your best friend, a sister's miscarriage, a brother's drug-dabbling, the flunked five-paragraph essay on "Animal Farm" you spent an all-nighter on and the four prison walls of a bedroom on a bad day as a worst-case scenario.
And you're still probably nowhere near understanding it.
That was true for a close friend of hers, said the Mayfield girl. When she discovered her friend's self-injury, it threatened to destroy their relationship. The Mayfield girl re-prioritized.
She stopped cutting for seven months - until a series of traumas triggered her again. She spent a week in the hospital after threatening suicide. She was prescribed anti-depressants, three kinds. A violent episode in a friend's bathroom - one of 16 suicide attempts - ended with her arms bloody and her hands in police handcuffs. She spent two more months in residential treatment.
Cutting increases, causes unclear
Psychologist Dr. Martin Greer said he's seen the problem throughout his 18 years with Las Cruces Public Schools, but more than half of his middle school counselors had recently been reporting an increase.
On Oct. 19, a daylong mental health conference gathered counselors, parents, students and teachers from across Las Cruces to focus on identification, prevention and intervention of suicidal or self-injurious behavior. The keynote speaker was Dr. Scott Poland, past president of the National Association of School Psychologists, who served on-site after the five major school shootings of the 1990s - including Columbine - and currently works as a crisis coordinator at Nova Southeastern University in Florida. Preliminary results of a counselor survey - which indicated that at least anecdotally, self-injury is perceived to be on the rise in Las Cruces - were also presented by New Mexico State University's Dr. Lisa Grayshield, an associate professor of counseling and psychology. Grayshield called the day "baby steps" for the Las Cruces area.
"We have no national data (on cutting) that I know of as yet," she said, apart from a study this year that stated 20 percent of teens engaged in self-injuring behavior. "This phenomenon is fairly recent."
Right now, compared to bullies and drug abuse, she said self-injury doesn't rank high as a concern of the general population.
"It's not like it's reached some sort of critical mass," she said, though she says from what she sees, the 20 percent figure is "conservative."
"Counselors and nurses run across this because either a kid comes to a counselor or a teacher or friend or parent might refer them of course because they see a kid cutting on themselves and it's very, very serious."
But Grayshield cautions that self-injury only relates to suicide "a little bit."
"People who cut are at greater risk, but in terms of people who complete suicides, it's not a predictor," Grayshield said.
Greer says once more facts are in, "we need to pay it forward" by raising awareness among teachers, administrators, parents and students.
Poland says sometimes the behavior goes away after adolescence. Sometimes it doesn't.
Cutting fills various needs
For people dealing with it today, "the goal can't be to immediately eliminate the behavior," which releases endorphins and bottled emotions, Poland said. However destructive and dangerous, like smoking cigarettes or drinking to excess, self-injury "fulfills a number of needs ... cutting is working for them."
He recalls parents of a cutter who seemed oblivious to the wounds that never healed on her arms, who was using up bandages in bulk around the house. The daughter always claimed she got scratched up riding an ATV through the woods.
Brigitte Zigelhofer, whose son is in seventh grade in Las Cruces, said what she'd heard of the behavior worried her.
"Kids have so much stress on them these days that it seems like they just don't know where to turn for help," she said. "I'm one of the lucky ones - my child will come to me when he's worried or upset, but not every child has that kind of connection with a parent."
Zigelhofer said parents need to open their eyes and make sure their kids have someone who will listen to them when they need it - especially when they're sad or upset.
"What's important to a child may not seem like a big deal to an adult," she said. "We have to remember their worries are different from ours."
Matt Groening, creator of "The Simpsons" and the "Life in Hell" comics, was asked in 1993 why, as kids, "most everyone has a sense that things are screwy, how is it that, as adults, we perpetuate the screwiness?"
"Most grown-ups forget what it was like to be a kid," Groening said.
Perhaps the seminal song about cutting, "Hurt," a 1994 song by Nine Inch Nails, the video for which featured a fresh-faced, suburban Maggie Gyllenhaal harming herself, explains some of the mindset: "I hurt myself today to see if I still feel; I focus on the pain - the only thing that's real."
The Mayfield girl is trying to move beyond that frame of mind.
It's been since June that she's gone without cutting herself. She's staying off the medicine. She gets along with her therapist. Home life is more stable. She has people to look up to.
Greer said in addition to getting help from family, neutral parties or therapists, people who self-injure can help themselves without risking permanent scars or injury.
When it is the pain they seek, they can hold ice cubes in their hands or snap rubber bands around their wrists or arms. When it is the sight of blood that relieves, cutters can replace self-injury by drawing in red marker, or by painting red nail polish on their skin, then flaking it off when it dries.
The Mayfield girl tried the rubber bands and the hot lines, but what helps her more is painting, venting online, writing stories, texting a friend and most of all, human contact. That helps her remember that she is a person - a person who is loved. When she thinks about the impact her cuts, or her death, would have on the friends and family who care about her, she knows they would be devastated.
Grayshield said people who self-injure, especially at the middle school level, can be serious - or copycats.
"There can be four or five kids where it's sort of a trendy thing that they do once or twice and they say, 'well, that wasn't very fun.' But there are about 20 percent (of cutters) who have more serious psychological problems," she said.
The Mayfield girl can attest to the difference.
One friend did it when she was angry at her friends, to avoid lashing out at them. Others, girls two years younger, saw her scars and showed up the next day to show her their arms - covered in cuts. The new trend.
Don't judge, don't ignore
Whatever the impetus, if you know someone who cuts themselves, professionals advise telling someone, just in case. The Mayfield girl says it is also important to lend an ear without judgment.
"It's the whole, "you wouldn't understand' thing," she said. "And the best thing to say is, "I know I don't understand. But I can be there for you. Don't be sorry for having feelings.'"
Poland says, "the typical response is to be horrified." A lot of adults, new to the issue of self-injury and unable to see the underlying struggle, say they couldn't work with such kids.
"I say, 'well, don't,' " he said.
"They come and pull off their bandages sometimes, as a test: 'Are you going to be grossed out? Are you going to focus on the wound? Or on me, as a person?'"
Parents and school staff often have a perception of self-injury that is connected to listening to gloomy music and wearing black. The perception says if you skateboard or listen to emo band Dashboard Confessional, you are more likely to slice your arms with scissors.
If only it were that simple.
Out of context, singing along to Gerard Way, of rock group My Chemical Romance, and his "songs that make you slit your wrists," can seem new and troubling to parents who were never fans of Pink Floyd, Nick Drake, or the blues.
But saying self-injury can be contained within one clique of kids, one group of fans of one type of music, galls those who have been there.
"The quiet ones? You can't tell," said the Mayfield girl. "It's hard to tell who's doing it or not."
Nor does the perception, however prevalent, hold water, say the experts. Those who self-injure can - are - also the jazz-band members, pre-mission Mormons, theater kids and cheerleaders.
Poland said those who self-injure tend to be "likable, functional and intelligent kids, but they break down under stress."
The Mayfield girl prefers Slayer herself.
"It's not just emo kids," she says. "Pretty girls can do it, too."
Ashley Meeks can be reached at ameeks@lcsun-news.com
Traits
Trauma history
Mental disintegration under stress
Rage toward a powerful figure in their lives that can not be expressed
Impulse control problem
Rigid all or nothing thinking
Lack emotional closeness with others
Self mutilation
Surveys have found up to 13% ofadolescents engage in it
Usually begins and ends in adolescence
Majority are female
Often associated with sexual abuse, family violence, PTSD and eating disorders
Triggers: recent loss, peer conflict and intimacy problems
What do kids say?
Want to feel concrete pain when psychological pain is overwhelming
Reduces numbness
Keeps trauma from intruding
I cut so I will not kill myself
Gets attention of others
Discharges tension, anger and despair
Gain a sense of control
Punish myself
Cutting "is better than going out and getting drunk"
Resources
Books
"The Scarred Soul" by Tracy Alderman
"Bright Red Scream" by Marilee Strong
Phone numbers
Southwest Counseling Center hot line: (800) 964-1542
La Piρon 24-Hour Crisis Hot line: (888) 595-7273
Agora Crisis Center: (866) 435-7166
Nationally: (800) 784-2433 or (800) 366-8388
To view the presentation on suicide and self-injury presented at the Oct. 19 conference in Las Cruces, or to download a survey about self-injury to assist with the NMSU research project about the topic, click here. |
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