[Cmi-mulheres] Girl Talk: Why We Cut and Burn Ourselves

[isadoralins em riseup.net]

HEALTH & ENVIRONMENT
Girl Talk: Why We Cut and Burn Ourselves

By Emma Pearse - WeNews correspondent

(WOMENSENEWS)--Corin (a pseudonym), a 19-year old teen from central south
Connecticut, can remember the first time she cut herself. She was 15 and
watching a Disney movie. She picked up a razor and sliced into the veins
on her right foot.

"I discovered cutting by attempts at killing myself," Corin wrote in a
recent e-mail to Women's eNews. "As early as seventh grade I had been
slicing at my veins, with the intention of killing myself. I realized that
sometimes just cutting the skin away from the vein made me feel better.
And I began to do it more and more often."

Corin is one of thousands of female teens logging on to hard-to-locate
Internet chat rooms. Many users keep their chat room addresses private or
for use by a select few, yet some go so far as to create personal Web
sites. One such site, Self Injury: A Struggle, was started by Gabrielle, a
19 year old, eager to share her experience with self injury "to let others
know that they are not alone in their struggle," she writes.

"It started as an attempt on my part to contribute my voice and my
opinions in the then growing awareness of self-injury," she writes. "To
use my voice to say that self-injurers are valid individuals and that they
are more than a label."

Although no current data exist to prove their hunches, analysts and
clinicians say that the incidence of self injury, which consists most
commonly of behaviors such as cutting, burning, and hair pulling, may be
increasing. They point to the emergence of a culture in which it is
acceptable--perhaps desirable--to talk about it.

Research from the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
indicates that 1-in-4 adolescents in the United States thinks about
suicide each year and by the end of high school at least 1-in-10 has made
a suicide attempt. In 2000, suicide was the third leading cause of death
among 15-to-24 year olds. Data from the National Institute of Mental
Health in Bethesda, Md., indicate that between 1995 and 2000, though four
times as many men as women died from suicide, women attempted suicide
two-to-three times more often than men.

Existing research indicates that during adolescence, female teens are
twice as likely as teen-age males to suffer from depression, often with
self injury as a related behavior. The research also indicates that people
born in the last two decades are likely to experience depression earlier
in life than in previous decades.

Dr. David Fassler, a child and adolescent psychiatrist in Burlington, Vt.,
warns, however, that self injury has been difficult to research due to its
secretive nature.

"For many years self harm was something that kids kept to themselves,"
says Fassler. "Now it's something that they're more likely to talk about."

Particularly Female Affliction

Linda Lebelle, director of Focus Adolescent Services based in Salisbury,
Md., agrees. She says that, among professionals working with teens, most
are aware that cutting is a particularly female affliction and there is a
growing sense that, during the past few years, more female teens have
begun to call help lines to talk about hurting themselves.

"Traditionally boys are able to express anger outwardly more directly.
Girls live in a much more body-focused culture," says Dr. Wendy Lader,
clinical director of Safe Alternative, a hospital-based program in
Naperville, Ill., that caters exclusively to the treatment of self injury.

"Skin is a bulletin board," Lader says. "They're saying, 'Can you see how
much pain I'm in?'"

Lader believes the behavior is increasing for several reasons. "A lot of
kids are feeling very invisible these days," she says. "There are many
reasons for this--higher rates of divorce, more isolated activities such
as computers." Self harm makes their experience more visible, she adds,
and sometimes there is the contagion effect. "Movies are showing beautiful
girls who are self injuring. There is a desire to glamorize this."

Plenty of Cultural Attention

Last year, the movies "Secretary" and "Thirteen" portrayed adolescent
females cutting and burning themselves in response to loneliness and
family neglect. Sexual abuse was hinted at, but never made explicit. The
play "Cut," adapted from the four-year-old book of the same title by
Patricia McCormick, ran at a playhouse in Laguna Beach, Ca. Local
newspapers have covered the subject and Tracey Gold's documentary,
"Cutters: Self Abuse," ran last year on the Discovery Health Channel. This
month, one of the main characters on a MTV series, "The Real World, San
Diego," Frankie, revealed a habit of cutting.

Whatever their cultural cues, teens who cut themselves are indicating a
state of mind and perhaps a personal history--tough childhoods, mental
illnesses or peer pressures--that call out for medical attention, says
Lebelle, from Maryland's adolescent services. "It seems to be that a high
proportion of kids who cut or self injure have suffered some sort of
trauma: abuse, molestation or rape."

Both Fassler and Lader regard self harm as a symptom rather than a diagnosis.

"The goal is to get people to recognize that self injury is a clue," says
Lader, the self-injury specialist. "There's some kind of a feeling that
they don't want to experience. And they need to figure out why at that
moment they are having that impulse. And rather than self medicate it with
self injury, we want them to understand what they are feeling, label their
feelings and challenge those irrational thoughts."

Impulse-Control Logs

Lader has her clients keep "impulse control logs" in which they track
every time they feel an impulse to injure.

The teens who responded to a Women's eNews posting openly described lives
of enormous sadness, little-understood emotions and an inexplicable
attraction to the thrill of self-inflicted pain.

Corin was just one of many girls who responded to a posting on the Web
site operated by Focus Adolescent Services. Teens from the ages of 14 to
26, from Colorado to Connecticut, wrote introducing themselves with lines
such as "Hi, my name is Abby. I am 17 and I am a cutter."

Corin says she was sexually abused as a child and that she has seen
therapists, psychiatrists and been in a hospital outpatient program for
suicide attempts. She writes she is grateful not to have had access to
weapons more serious than razors and Tylenol.

"All I have to say is that I am very lucky that my parents don't keep a
gun in the house," she writes. "I am convinced I would not be here today
if they did."

To read more postings from teens who harm themselves, go to

Women's eNews: - "Female Teens Discuss Their Self Injury": -
http://womensenews.org/article.cfm/dyn/aid/1789

Emma Pearse writes about pop culture and women's issues from her home in
New York City.

For more information:

SAFE Alternatives (Self-Abuse Finally Ends): - http://www.selfinjury.com

Self Injury: A Struggle: - http://www.self-injury.net

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