How Many Teenage Girls Deliberately Harm Themselves?

How Many Teenage Girls Deliberately Harm Themselves? Nearly 1 in 4, Survey Finds.

Up to 30 percent of teenage girls in some parts of the us say they need  intentionally injured themselves without getting to kill, researchers have found.

About one in four adolescent girls deliberately harmed herself within the previous year, often by cutting or burning, compared to about one in 10 boys.

The overall prevalence of self-harm was almost 18 percent.

“These numbers are very high for both genders — that surprised me,” said Martin A.

Monto, a sociologist at the University of Portland and lead author of the new research.

Dr. Monto and his colleagues drew on data from a risk behavior survey administered by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2015.

Their report, published online in the American Journal of Public Health included almost 65,000 public high school students in 11 states.

Most previous studies have examined self-harm among adolescents only in developed countries, generally, or in American adolescents admitted to a clinical setting.

Delaware reported rock bottom rates of deliberate injury: 6.4 percent among boys and 17.7 percent among girls.

The very best rates were found among boys in Nevada (14.8 percent) and girls in Idaho (30.8 percent).

Adolescents of both sexes reported injuring themselves at rates above 20 percent in Idaho, Kentucky, Nevada, and New Mexico.

Girls reported self-injury at twice the speed of boys altogether but two states.

The results varied by race. quite 20 percent of Native American students reported self-harm, followed by Hispanic, white, and Asian students.

Only 12 percent of black students reported self-injury.

The behavior also declined with age, from 19.4 percent among 14-year-olds to 14.7 percent among 18-year-olds.

There are wide gaps in researchers’ understanding of self-harm, Dr. Monto noted:

“Is adolescence harder in some states than in others? What does it actually mean to them once they do it? How is that the behavior learned and regarded differently in several  cultures?”

Adolescent girls who participated in the survey were more likely than boys to report belonging to the L.G.B.T. community and having been sexually assaulted or bullied online.

But males were more likely to report smoking and using drugs

All of these factors were a minimum of somewhat linked with a purposeful injury.

The C.D.C. only recently began asking adolescents about self-injury, so it's unclear whether there has been a big uptick in the prevalence over generations.

The practice is so widespread across both sexes that addressing it on a case-by-case basis — rather than as public ill-health — could also be insufficient, the researchers said.

“Parents who affect this often think their child may be a clinical anomaly,” Dr. Monti said.

“It’s never a healthy behavior — it’s harmful. But if your the child has done this, the data shows that it doesn’t make them a strangely ill person.”