Jim Liebelt's Youth Culture Watch

Which Kids Face the Highest Risk of Self-Harm?

The following is excerpted from an online article posted by HealthDay.

Growing numbers of American kids and teens are cutting or burning themselves, banging their heads against walls, pulling out their hair and even trying to die by suicide. But figuring out who is at highest risk for harming themselves has been a daunting challenge until now.

Researchers report they have developed risk profiles that can help doctors pinpoint which kids or teens are in the most danger.

"The U.S. is in the midst of a mental health crisis, with mental health diagnoses and hospitalizations surging over the past few years, and many of these hospitalizations are for self-harm events or concern for future self-harm," said study author Dr. James Antoon, an assistant professor of pediatrics and hospital medicine at Monroe Carell Jr. Children's Hospital at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn.

"Self-harm is a big bucket of events from mild things like cutting on the arms or thighs to taking so much Tylenol that you die on purpose or jumping out of a window, and we wanted to find out which kids require hospitalization and more intensive treatment and monitoring," he said.

His team developed four risk profiles for serious self-harm based on age, gender, and psychiatric and medical conditions. Of nearly 1,100 children hospitalized for psychiatric reasons at two children's hospitals from April 2016 to March 2020, 37% were there for self-harm.

The researchers found that boys aged 10 to 13 with ADHD, bipolar disorder, autism spectrum disorder, or another developmental disorder were 80% more likely to engage in serious self-harm behavior that requires hospitalization. Meanwhile, teen girls aged 14 to 17 with depression and anxiety, substance- and trauma-related disorders, and personality and eating disorders were also at high risk for serious self-harm, the study showed.

Suicide attempts comprised the majority of serious self-harm behaviors in the study.

In a counterintuitive finding, kids who were at moderate risk for serious self-harm didn't necessarily have depression, Antoon said. "It is assumed that if you are suicidal, you must be depressed, but there are other things that can drive self-harm and suicide, including anxiety disorders," he noted.

The study was published online in the journal Pediatrics.

Source: HealthDay
https://consumer.healthday.com/self-harm-2659908631.html

Teen Social Media Posts About Cutting, Other Self-Harm Are Soaring

*The following is excerpted from an online article posted by HealthDay.

American teens are increasingly turning to the social media giant Instagram to share graphic images of their own attempts to harm themselves, a new study reveals.

"It could be an attempt to share their emotional or psychological pain with others or find support from others," said study lead author Amanda Giordano. She is an associate professor of counseling and human development services at the University of Georgia, in Athens. "It could be to discuss different forms of self-injury or how to hide it or do it in a way that does not lead to infection. It could also be a way of seeking help and reasons to stop."

No matter the reason, researchers who tracked Instagram throughout 2018 found that teen postings focused on self-harm — such as cutting or burning oneself — rose significantly over the course of the year.

In January and February of 2018, for instance, teens posted between 58,000 and 68,000 images with hashtags related to some form of self-injury in which suicide was not the apparent goal. The researchers labeled such images as reflective of non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI).

But by December of 2018, that figure had shot up to over 112,000, the study found, with notable rises in the use of three hashtags: #selfharm, #hatemyself, and #selfharmawareness.

The big picture was also bleak: Overall in 2018, more than 1.2 million teen NSSI posts were identified on Instagram accompanied by one of the three hashtags, along with two others: #cutting and #selfharmmm.

Overall, the hashtag #selfharm was most closely linked with suicide (25.4%), then depression (25.2%), followed by self-injury (13.1%) and general mental distress (9.5%), the study found.

The hashtag #hatemyself was most associated with suicide (32.1%), then depression (31.2%), self-injury (19.9%), and anxiety/panic (6.7%).

A rise in teenage self-harm itself appears to be driving the rise in online expressions about it, Giordano said.

The findings were published recently in the International Journal for the Advancement of Counselling.

Source: HealthDay
https://consumer.healthday.com/11-15-teen-social-media-posts-about-cutting-other-self-harm-are-soaring-2655537447.html

Teens with a History of Self-Harm Have a Significantly Higher Threshold for Pain

*The following is excerpted from an online article posted on MedicalXpress.

New research from the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN) at King's College London, in collaboration with Glasgow University, has found that teenagers who have self-harmed five or more times in their life have a significantly higher threshold for pain compared to adolescents that have not.

The study, which has been published in JAMA Network Open, is the largest study of its kind looking at the relationship between self-harm and bodily sensation, found that the threshold for sensitivity, both painful and not, increases significantly the more a participant had self-harmed in the past.

64 participants aged between 12-17 were recruited from a mixture of community and residential care settings, as well as schools and youth groups in London and Glasgow. Each individual underwent a series of 13 tests, including thermal detection and pain thresholds, and pressure pain thresholds to establish at what point they detected a change in sensation or first began to feel pain.

Dr. Dennis Ougrin, the study's Co-Lead author from King's IoPPN, said "From the studies that we conducted, we can see that teenagers who have self-harmed five or more times in their past have a dramatically higher pain threshold, particularly in individuals that are living in care."

"Once a person has become comfortable enough with pain, when they have raised the threshold far above what it would normally be in someone that hasn't self-harmed, it is at that point we can say that they are at greater risk of suicide."

The investigators now hope that these findings can be converted into a simple test using a pressure sensor to effectively identify at-risk individuals so that they can be provided with targeted support.

Source: MedicalXpress
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-07-teens-history-self-harm-significantly-higher.html

Study Finds Self-Harm May be Socially Contagious Among Adolescents

*The following is excerpted from an online article posted on EurekAlert.

A new study led by the University of Ottawa epidemiologist Dr. Ian Colman suggests non-suicidal self-injury--behaviors like cutting oneself without the intent to die--may be contagious among teenagers, who are more likely to harm themselves when they know someone who has.

The study, published in the peer-reviewed journal Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, used 2014 data collected from over 1,400 Ontario teenagers between the ages of 14-17. Dr. Colman and his team focused on the answers to the question, "Has a friend of yours ever hurt themselves without the intention to die?" A positive response saw the respondent two to three times as likely to answer 'Yes' to the question of whether they have thought about, or done, the same.

These results are of concern, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, because, apart from being a sign of acute distress, non-suicidal self-injury is a predictor of later suicidal behavior and more widespread.

"Non-suicidal self-injury is much more common than suicide attempts--twice as common in this study--and many, many times more common than death by suicide," says Dr. Colman, an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Medicine and holder of the Canada Research Chair in Mental Health Epidemiology.

Dr. Colman's study builds on previous research showing teens who are exposed to suicide among their peers are more than twice as likely to demonstrate suicidal behavior or harbor suicidal thoughts than those who are not exposed. This sort of communication of ideation and behavior is a form of contagion, and its spread can be tracked by epidemiologists just as physically communicable diseases are studied.

Source: EurekAlert!
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-10/uoo-uoo100120.php

Overdose Attempts Skyrocket Among Teens, Young Adults

*The following is excerpted from an online article posted on HealthDay.

Suicide attempts by drug overdoses and other "self-poisonings" more than doubled among U.S. youth in the last decade, a new study reveals.

And attempts by girls and young women more than tripled during that time period, according to the analysis of National Poison Data System information.

Most of the self-poisonings "are drug overdoses, but they use a lot of over-the-counter meds [such as] acetaminophen, antihistamines, along with their prescription meds," explained study co-author Henry Spiller. He directs the Central Ohio Poison Center at Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus.

The findings showed that there were more than 1.6 million intentional self-poisoning cases among 10- to 24-year-olds nationwide between 2000 and 2018 -- more than 71% (1.1 million) involving females.

Suicide is the second-leading cause of death among Americans in that age group. While more males die by suicide, females attempt suicide more than males. Self-poisoning is the most common method in suicide attempts and third-most common method of suicide in teens, the researchers said.

"In youth overall, from 2010 to 2018, there was a 141% increase in attempts by self-poisoning reported to U.S. poison centers, which is concerning," Spiller said.

In a hospital news release, he added that "the severity of outcomes in adolescents has also increased, especially in 10- to 15-year-olds."

The study was published online in The Journal of Pediatrics.

Study co-author John Ackerman is the suicide prevention coordinator at the Center for Suicide Prevention and Research at Nationwide Children's Hospital.

"Suicide in children under 12 years of age is still rare, but suicidal thoughts and attempts in this younger age group do occur, as these data show," he said in the news release.

Source: HealthDay
https://consumer.healthday.com/general-health-information-16/suicide-health-news-646/overdose-attempts-skyrocket-among-teens-young-adults-study-745524.html

Teens Who Hurt Themselves More Likely to Hurt Others

*The following is excerpted from an online article posted on HealthDay.

Teens who harm themselves are three times more likely to commit violent crimes than those who don't, a new study reveals.

"We know that some individuals who self-harm also inflict harm on others," said study author Leah Richmond-Rakerd, from Duke University.

"What has not been clear is whether there are early-life characteristics or experiences that increase the risk of violent offending among individuals who self-harm," she added in a university news release. "Identifying these risk factors could guide interventions that prevent and reduce interpersonal violence."

The investigators also found that adolescents who harm themselves and commit violent crimes are likely to have been mistreated in childhood and have poor self-control.

Incidents of teens cutting or burning themselves have substantially increased in recent years, both in the United States and the United Kingdom.

Among teen girls, about one in four tries to harm herself, as do one in 10 teen boys. In the United Kingdom, the incidence of self-injury among teen girls has risen nearly 70 percent in three years, the researchers found.

For the study, Richmond-Rakerd and colleagues compared young people who engage in "dual-harm" behavior -- self-harm plus violent crime -- with those who only self-harm.

The study participants included more than 2,200 U.K. twins born in 1994 and 1995, who took part in the Environmental Risk (E-Risk) Longitudinal Twin Study.

The twins were followed across their first 20 years of life.

The findings showed that self-harm and violent crime didn't go together because of genetics or family risk factors, according to Terrie Moffitt, founder of the E-Risk Study.

"This means that young people who self-harm may see violence as a way of solving problems and begin to use it against others as well as themselves," Moffitt said.

The study authors advised that teens who harm themselves should be evaluated for the risk of suicide and the risk that they might harm others. In addition, helping self-harmers learn self-control might help prevent violent crime and reduce other harmful behavior.

The report was published in the American Journal of Psychiatry.

Source: HealthDay
https://consumer.healthday.com/public-health-information-30/violence-health-news-787/teens-who-hurt-themselves-more-likely-to-hurt-others-741168.html

Study Finds Significant Levels of Self-Harm Among U.S. High School Students

*The following is excerpted from an online article posted on PRNewswire.

According to a new study from the University of Portland, this year 1 in 4 high school girls will deliberately injure themselves by methods as extreme as cutting themselves or burning their own skin.

The study, the first of its kind to use weighted probability sampling, reveals significantly high levels of deliberate, non-suicidal self-injury among large, representative, non-clinical samples of U.S. high school students (n=64,671). Using Centers for Disease Control data from 11 states collected in 2015, the study shows that about 1 in 4 high school girls and about 1 in 10 high school boys deliberately hurt themselves without trying to kill themselves during the previous 12 months. Individual states had substantially different rates of self-injury, with boys ranging from 6.4% (Delaware) to 14.8% (Nevada) and girls from 17.7% (Delaware) to 30.8% (Idaho).

Among the patterns the study revealed was that the behavior was more commonly reported among 14-year olds and diminished with age. Rates were higher among students identifying as Native American, Hispanic, or Whites than they were among those identifying as Asian or Black.

Consistent with other studies, adolescents were more likely to report deliberate self-injury if they noted being sad or thinking about or attempting suicide. Drug and alcohol use were also associated with self-injury, as was fighting, being electronically bullied, or having experienced forced sex.

The findings are timely, as public concern with adolescent mental health has grown. Additionally, though deliberate self-injury is different than suicide, persons who self-injure are also more likely to consider and attempt suicide.

The authors argue that self-injury among adolescents is so widespread that clinical and therapeutic interventions may be insufficient to address this public health problem. Since many other health risk behaviors are associated with self-injury, efforts to address the problem should be incorporated into broader efforts to address mental health among children and adolescents.

The study was published in the American Journal of Public Health.

Source: PRNewswire
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/newly-released-study-shows-significant-levels-of-self-harm-among-us-high-school-students-300670479.html

Cutting, Self-Harm Greatly Raise Suicide Risk for Teens

*The following is excerpted from an online article posted on HealthDay.

Young people treated for self-inflicted injuries face a far higher-than-average risk of suicide in the next year, a new study finds.

Among teenagers and young adults diagnosed with a "self-harm" injury, the risk of suicide in the next year was nearly 27 times higher than the U.S. norm, researchers found.

Certain young people were at particular risk -- including Native Americans, males and those who'd used especially violent means of self-harm, including guns.

It's been known that kids who self-harm can face a heightened risk of suicide. But health experts said the new findings help pinpoint some of the most vulnerable groups.

"When young people self-harm, it can be a sign of serious mental health distress," said lead researcher Dr. Mark Olfson. He's a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center in New York City.

This study, he said, "helps us identify particularly high-risk groups who require close follow-up in the year following self-harm."

Olfson and his colleagues reported the findings in the journal Pediatrics.

Statistics suggest that about 1 percent of people self-harm -- usually beginning in adolescence or early adulthood, according to the U.S. Department of Health.

This study defined "self-harm" as self-inflicted injuries that may or may not have had suicidal intent. The injuries ranged from cutting and burning to poisoning and gunshot wounds.

In the case of young people who used especially violent methods, there is a good chance the initial injury was a suicide attempt, according to Lori Evans. She is a clinical assistant professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at NYU Langone Health in New York City.

"But it's not clear from the data," said Evans, who reviewed the study.

Regardless, the findings highlight an important point, according to Evans.

"When you see signs of self-harming behaviors in kids, you do want to act quickly to address it," she said.

"The younger we get kids, the better," Evans said. If they get help, she explained, it's possible to keep self-harming incidents from becoming a "pattern of behavior."

The study findings are based on records from the Medicaid program, which provides health insurance for lower-income Americans.

Olfson's team focused on nearly 32,400 teens and young adults, aged 12 to 24, who'd been diagnosed with a self-inflicted injury. Half were treated in an emergency room. The rest were either hospitalized or had outpatient care.

Overall, 48 of those young people died by suicide in the following year. That rate is almost 27 times higher than the norm for Americans in their demographic, according to the researchers.

Those who'd harmed themselves with a firearm were at particular risk: Compared with young people who'd self-harmed through such means as cutting, they were 36 times more likely to kill themselves.

Source: HealthDay
https://consumer.healthday.com/general-health-information-16/suicide-health-news-646/cutting-self-harm-greatly-raise-suicide-risk-for-teens-732051.html

Cutting Increasing Among Adolescents

A new study finds teenage girls are more likely than teenage boys to self-harm.

Researchers also found that a fifth of adolescents who have self-harmed have cut themselves in front of others. The new study also revealed that deliberate cutting is normalizing, as an increasing number of self-reported popular kids are self-harming.

Lead researcher Dr. Shelley James of Massey University in New Zealand claims that self-harm has increased over the last decade. She claims that adolescent girls are also up to eight times more likely to self-harm than their male counterparts.

The latest study involved 387 girls between the ages of 13 and 16. Overall, 84 girls identified as self-harmers.

After comparing responses on the number of measures of underlying psychological difficulties between two groups, researchers found that underlying beliefs of vulnerability and low levels of parent influence were more common among self-harming girls. Researchers also found that there were always underlying deeper emotional problems attached to self-harming behavior.

"There were some surprising results," James said in a news release. "The number of girls who had actually harmed in front of other people was staggering to me." "Approximately 23 percent of self-harming kids had harmed in front of other people, and nearly 12 per cent had actually harmed in conjunction with another person, so they had harmed together. I didn't expect to see those kinds of figures."

Furthermore, researchers found that self-harm was no longer considered shocking or associated exclusively to the disenfranchised or those with serious mental health problems. "You have this stereotypical image of this reclusive, socially awkward person that self-harms," James explained. "But the self-harming girls were far more likely to self-identify as being among the popular kids in school, and self-harming was not restricted to those commonly seen as the highly troubled teens."

Source: Counsel & Heal
http://www.counselheal.com/articles/7900/20131209/self-harming-increasing-adolescents-study.htm

Childhood Bullying Increases Risk of Self-Harm in Adolescence

A new study has proven that being bullied during childhood directly increases the likelihood of self- harm in late adolescence.

The analysis, led by researchers from the University of Warwick in association with colleagues at the University of Bristol, highlights that being bullied at primary school age can cause enough distress to significantly increase the risk of self-harming in later adolescence.

Almost 5,000 participants in the Children of the 90s study were assessed for exposure to bullying between seven and ten years of age and later asked whether they had engaged in self-harm at sixteen to seventeen years.

The study found that 16.5% of 16-17 year olds had self-harmed in the previous year, and 26.9% of these did so because they felt as though they 'wanted to die'. Those who were subjected to chronic bullying over a number of years at primary school were nearly five times more likely to self-harm six to seven years later in adolescence.

Professor Dieter Wolke of the University of Warwick explained, "It is further evidence for doing away with the myth that bullying at a young age can be viewed as a harmless rite of passage. I'd like to see clinicians routinely asking children about bullying - from name calling to more physical acts of abuse. The importance of this early intervention should not be understated. If we were able to eliminate bullying, while other exposures remained constant, there would be a potential to prevent 20% of all self-harm cases."

The research was published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry.

Source: News Medical
http://www.news-medical.net/news/20130528/New-study-shows-childhood-bullying-increases-risk-of-self-harming-in-later-adolescence.aspx