Teens engage in cutting, self-injury to relieve distress

Every­body expe­ri­ences some form of stress in their life. Stress may be caused by try­ing to meet a work or school dead­line, rela­tion­ship issues or finan­cial wor­ries. Stress can feel dif­fer­ent for dif­fer­ent peo­ple; some may feel sad or anx­ious while oth­ers may feel anger or frus­tra­tion. Some peo­ple will nat­u­rally feel higher lev­els of stress than oth­ers and may cope with stress in dif­fer­ent ways.

The way some­one deals with stress may depend on a person’s bio­log­i­cal makeup or a trau­matic expe­ri­ence at a young age. Some peo­ple may go to the gym to exer­cise to help relieve stress while oth­ers may turn to drugs or alco­hol. One way many teens deal with stress is by engag­ing in self-injury.

Self injury can include using a hot cig­a­rette lighter to scorch the flesh or tak­ing an eraser and vig­or­ously rub­bing the skin off their body. The most com­mon way teens self injure is by tak­ing a sharp object such as a razor blade or knife and cut­ting into their flesh. Teens who engage in cut­ting are very good at hid­ing the phys­i­cal scars. Some may always wear long sleeved shirts or cover the scars with wrist bands and bracelets or they may cut in areas of their body that are usu­ally always cov­ered by cloth­ing, such as the upper thigh.

Most teens say they engage in cut­ting to soothe or relieve severe dis­tress. Psy­chol­o­gists have found that cut­ting is a quick fix to get rid of bad feel­ings and, just like drugs and alco­hol, can become addic­tive. Some men­tal health pro­fes­sion­als com­pare cut­ting to a “high” peo­ple expe­ri­ence dur­ing exer­cise when “feel-good” endor­phins are released. A teen may become psy­cho­log­i­cally addicted to this “high” and, just like drug or alco­hol addic­tion, may engage in riskier self injury to obtain that “high.” Because a teen needs to feel that “high,” he or she may acci­den­tally cut too deep and may not be able to stop the bleed­ing and they may risk a seri­ous infection.

Cut­ting to get rid of bad feel­ings is not nec­es­sar­ily a sui­cide attempt and is almost the oppo­site. Instead of want­ing to end their lives, cut­ters are seek­ing a way to get through the day with­out feel­ing badly. How­ever, cut­ting should be taken just as seri­ously as sui­cide. Par­ents need to main­tain open com­mu­ni­ca­tion with their teens and be a sup­port sys­tem to help their teens deal with stress. If your teen is engag­ing in cut­ting or any other form of self injury, seek assis­tance from a men­tal health pro­fes­sional and help keep our kids safe.

Keep­ing Our Kids Safe is brought to you the Delaware Police Depart­ment and School Resource Offi­cer Rod Glazer.

Posted by Rod Glazer on Nov 30 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.