Self-injury and cutting: Is your child at risk?

Professional help
At the time, Christine was already in therapy to deal with the abuse, and once the issue of self-injury was raised, the wheels were quickly set in motion to get proper professional help to target that problem, too.

Christine's history of sexual abuse is not necessarily typical of youth who hurt themselves. Research shows that people who self-injure come from all walks of life and are triggered into the behaviour for a variety of reasons -- some are dealing with a dysfunctional family life, while others are coping with feelings of low self-esteem.

Pressure to perform
Kids who have a deep-seated need to excel may also be drawn to acts of self-harm. “There are patterns of kids who are really high-achieving and who generally function really well,” says Claire Crooks, the associate director for the Centre for Prevention Science at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto and assistant professor at the University of Western Ontario's Centre for Research and Education on Violence Against Women and Children in London.

Some of these children are under a lot of pressure to perform. “Maybe they feel a lot of anxiety and aren't really in touch with their feelings,” says Crook.

It's clear that being an ideal parent doesn't guarantee that your child will not self-harm. “A whole bunch of these kids have very involved, caring parents, and there isn't that childhood abuse–trauma piece at all. There's something else at work,” says Heath.

Dealing with feelings
Whatever the root cause of this urge to feel pain, kids who harm themselves have one thing in common: difficulty dealing with their feelings. “They find their emotions unbearable,” says Heath. “Sometimes they can't name the emotion. Sometimes it's anger, and they feel their anger is so huge that it's scary. And they can't possibly express it.” In psychology lingo, it's called a maladaptive coping mechanism. Instead of externally venting their feelings or working them out, they turn to self-injury as a way of release, transferring internal hurt to an external part of their bodies.

Looking back, that inability to express emotions could have been a red flag that Chloe Schaffer* of Toronto was harming herself. “As a girl, she always internalized her feelings,” says Janet*, her mother.

Chloe's self-harm habit began when she was about nine. Kids were picking on her at school, and at the same time she felt an immense drive to get good grades. “It wasn't anything I ever really thought about,” she says today. “I didn't say, ‘OK, I'm going to do this.' It was just kind of what I did.”

Shocking behaviour
It started with banging her head against the window, and it was something she only did once in a while, when things got really bad. But as the bullying worsened she gradually switched to cutting. She would wait until late at night when the house was dark and quiet. She'd reach over to her bedside table and pick up whatever she had hidden there -- scissors or maybe a knife. She was often half asleep as she scraped the blade in small lines across her shoulder. There were times when she didn't even remember cutting herself.

Then her world got more tumultuous. In Grade 9, she was assaulted by a boy in her school. As anger seethed inside of her, the cutting became more frequent and the cuts a little deeper.

But again, her family had no clue about Chloe's secret self-injury. Janet didn't discover that her daughter was cutting herself until Chloe, now 18, was in Grade 10. A family friend, who had heard about it from one of Chloe's friends, called Janet to tell her about it.

It came as a complete shock. Janet couldn't accept that her daughter, a model child who always appeared confident and in control and excelled in school, was secretly using razor blades to make cuts on her shoulders.

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