Self-Harm Growing Among Girls: Study

NEW DELHI: Self-harm is becoming common among women aged 15-24 years, globally. The first population-based study on self-harm has found that almost one in 12 young people inflicted self-harm as adolescents, with more girls being involved in such acts.

Published in the Lancet, the study said self-harm has become a global health problem. "It is especially common among 15-24 year old women, a group in whom rates of serious self-harm seem to be rising," it added.

Self-cutting/burning as the commonest form of self-harm for adolescents along with other methods of self-harm, including poisoning/overdose and self-battery.

The authors followed a sample of young people from 1992 to 2008. The young people had a mean age of 15 years during the entry period of 1992-93, and a mean age of 29 years during the final wave of follow up in 2008.

Dr Nimesh Desai, head of the department of psychiatry at the Institute of Human Behaviour and Allied Sciences, agreed with the trend.

He said, "As gender roles change and women get more empowered, they demand and enjoy more financial and personal independence. Along with this increase their frustrations they can't address. We call these personality disorders and not mental illnesses." He added, "Among adolescents, self-harm is becoming very common. This is the result of our society changing - stress increasing and social support reducing. India too is seeing an increase in incidents of non-fatal deliberate self harm."

Experts say self-harm is an act with a non-fatal outcome in which an individual deliberately initiates behaviour (such as self-cutting), or ingests a toxic substance or object, with the intention of causing harm to themselves.

In the study, a total of 1,802 participants responded in the adolescent phase, with 149 (8%) reporting self-harm. More girls (10%) than boys (6%) reported self-harm, translating to a 60% increased risk of self-harm in girls compared with boys.

Adolescents, who experienced depression or anxiety, were around six times more likely to self-harm in young adulthood than adolescents without depression/anxiety.

During adolescence, incident self-harm was independently associated with symptoms of depression and anxiety (3.7 times increased risk as compared with no depression/anxiety), anti-social behaviour (doubling of risk), high-risk alcohol use (doubling of risk), cannabis use, (near-doubling of risk) and cigarette smoking (2·4 times increased risk).

A substantial reduction, however, in the frequency of self-harm during late adolescence was recorded and by age of 29, less than 1% of participants reported self-harm. In order to look at the continuity of self-harm, the authors looked at length at the 1,652 participants who had observations in both time periods, 136 of whom reported self-harming during adolescence.

Of these 136, 122 (90%) reported no further self-harm in young adulthood and only 14 (10%) reported continuing self-harm. Of the 14, who did continue with their self-harming behaviour, 13 were female and one male.

The study was conducted by Dr Paul Moran, King's College London, Institute of Psychiatry, UK, and Professor George C Patton, Centre for Adolescent Health at the Murdoch Children's Research Institute, Melbourne, Australia.