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Self-harm study gives insight into suicides
Source: Agencies |
November 18, 2011, Friday
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ONE in 12 young people, mostly girls, engage in self-harming such as cutting, burning or taking life-threatening risks, and around 10 percent of these continue to harm themselves deliberately into young adulthood, a study found yesterday.
Since self-harming is one of the strongest predictors of who will go on to commit suicide, the psychiatrists who conducted the study said they hoped its findings would help galvanize support for more active and earlier intervention for people at risk.
"The numbers we are talking about here are huge," said Keith Hawton of the Centre for Suicide Research at Britain's Oxford University.
George Patton, who led the study at the Centre for Adolescent Health at the Murdoch Children's Research Institute in Melbourne, Australia, said the findings revealed a "window of vulnerability" when young people were in their mid-teens and often struggling with emotional control.
"Self-harming represents a way of dealing with those emotions," he said.
In a report of their work in the Lancet medical journal, Patton's team also said young people who self-harm often have mental health problems that might not be resolved without treatment.
The team said: "Because of the association between self-harm and suicide … the treatment of common mental disorders during adolescence could constitute an important … component of suicide prevention in young adults."
Self-harm is a global health problem and is especially common among girls and women aged 15 to 24. Experts say they fear rates of self-abuse in this age group may be rising.
According to the World Health Organization, almost a million people die from suicide each year - a mortality rate of 16 per 100,000, or one death every 40 seconds. In the last 45 years, suicide rates have increased by 60 percent worldwide.
In this study, Patton and Paul Moran, of King's College London's Institute of Psychiatry, followed a sample of young people in Victoria, Australia, aged from 15 to 29 between 1992 and 2008.
A total of 1,802 people responded in the adolescent phase, and 149, or 8 percent, of them reported self-harm. More girls than boys said they self-harmed, with rates of 10 percent and 6 percent respectively, translating to a 60 percent increased risk of self-harm in girls compared with boys.
Moran said a combination of hormonal changes during puberty, brain changes in the mid-teens and environmental factors such as peer pressure, emotional difficulties and family tensions appeared to be key factors.
"Hormonal changes are highly likely to be important in creating a sort of chemical melting pot which is ripe for environmental factors to start working on - particularly difficult family dynamics," he said.
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