La Voz

Issue date: 6/19/06 Section: Features

Monday, June 19, 2006


Last week the San Jose Mercury News reported on a study about self-injury and college students. According to a survey conducted at Cornell and Princeton Universities, one in five respondents admitted to purposefully injuring themselves by cutting, burning or other methods.

Self-injury is described as any behavior that causes deliberate, non-lethal bodily injury. The most common behavior is cutting the skin, but other behaviors include burning the skin, hair pulling, head banging, picking scabs or intentionally breaking bones.

People engage in forms of self-injury as a way to cope with emotional distress. Some people use physical pain as a way to deal with or "feel" their emotional pain. Others use self-injury as a way to communicate what they cannot express verbally.

And still others use this behavior as a way to control themselves or their environment. It is estimated that approximately one percent of the population engages in selfinjury.

Most self-injurers are between the ages of 13 and 30, female and have experienced some sort of emotional trauma. One theory about why the majority of self-injurers are women has to do with the different way men and women are socialized to deal with "negative" feelings. For the most part, men are encouraged to outwardly express feelings of rage or anger but women are not. Furthermore, women are taught that negative emotions are inappropriate or just plain wrong.

For some people, the self-destructive behavior is a symptom of another psychological disorder such as an eating disorder, bipolar or other mood disorder or obsessivecompulsive disorder. For these reasons, it is important to get professional help.

There are many self-help techniques that you can try. First, it is important to want to stop, as opposed to feeling like you should stop. Before you stop, you should take some time to really analyze what the cutting or other self-injury is doing for you so that you can find replacement behaviors that attempt to meet the same needs.

For example, to alleviate feelings of anger, frustration or restlessness, try cutting something like a plastic bottle or a piece of cardboard, hitting a punching bag or throwing rocks at a (non-living) target.

If you cut to help deal with feelings of sadness or depression, you might want to try something that comforts you such as taking a bubble bath, listening to soothing music or watching TV. To help cope with cravings of sensation to wanting to feel something, try squeezing ice, biting into something strong like a chili pepper or putting a rubber band around your wrist and snapping it.

If you like to see blood, one suggestion is to write on yourself with a red marker. If you pick scabs, try applying a paste of henna or glue to your skin, letting it dry and then picking it off.

For in-depth information about selfinjury, including a more extensive list of these self-help suggestions, log onto http://www.palace.net/~llama/psych/fself.html. Other helpful websites are http://www.coolnurse.com/self-injury.htm and http://www.kidshealth.org/teen/your_mind/feeling_sad/cutting.html.

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