Self-Injurying Teens Find a Bizarre New Extreme

by Tom Henderson (Subscribe to Tom Henderson's posts) Sep 10th 2010 12:20PM

Categories: Medical Conditions, In The News, Health & Safety Teens, Social & Emotional Growth Teens, Behavior Teens, Activities Teens, Research Reveals Teens, Health
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They cut themselves, burn themselves, starve themselves, gorge themselves, choke themselves and get high off everything from alcohol to aerosols.

Sooner or later, you would think, teenagers would run out of ways to destroy themselves.

Nope.

Business Week reports kids are now using themselves as human junkyards, embedding foreign objects under their skin.

According to Business Week, a 16-year-old girl recently showed up in an emergency room with 20 odds and ends -- including paper clips, pencil lead and even a pair of eyeglasses -- inside her body.

She reportedly put them there here in an excruciatingly painful process call "self-embedding."

William Shiels, a pediatric interventional radiologist at Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, tells Business Week kids don't want to kill themselves. They just want to hurt themselves. Horribly.

The act is similar to cutting, burning and other forms of self-mutilation, and many teens, he says, are ashamed of what they're doing and try to conceal their behavior.

In the upcoming October issue of the journal Radiology, Shiels and other researchers report that between 13 and 23 percent of American teenagers hurt themselves on purpose.

Researchers looked at 600 people of all ages who went to the hospital to have foreign objects removed from their bodies. They found 11 patients -- or 1.8 percent -- had put the objects there deliberately. They were all teenagers ages 14 to 18, and nine of them were girls.

All 11 teens suffered from some kind of psychological disorder, including depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety disorder, borderline personality disorder or post-traumatic stress disorder.

"One girl told us it's easier to deal with physical pain than the emotional pain in her life," Shiels tells Business Week. "The reason they cut and embed is an effort to relieve their internal pain, the pain that's inside."

Removing embedded objects can be difficult, Shiels adds. Surgeons often try to pinpoint the objects with ultrasound and remove them with tiny forceps, rather than resorting to more cutting.

"They have emotional pain already," Shiels tells Business Week of the kids. "They are already embarrassed and ashamed that they are hurting themselves. Leaving a large scar can degrade their self-image and complicate things worse. The beauty of doing this minimally invasive procedure, with a scar that is the size of a freckle, is that we don't add more emotional scars to these children."

Dr. Niranjan Karnik, an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral neuroscience at the University of Chicago Medical Center, concurs with Shiels, also telling Business Week kids who self-inflict wounds are not trying to kill themselves.

Indeed, he says, they engage in self-destructive behavior to avoid suicide.

"Self-injury is almost like a pressure valve for them," Karnik tells Business Week. "Without it, you have to ask, 'What is that kid going to do now?' We have to work with them to give them better strategies to relieve their stress and anxiety."

http://www.parentdish.com/2010/09/10/self-injurying-teens-find-a-bizarre-new-extreme/?icid=main|main|dl5|sec3_lnk2|169778

a little bit of physical pain displaces the emotional pain for a while...

so why is there so much emotional pain?!?

Too many mixed messages. As children begin to leave the confines of family, they depend more on peers for information than their own family. They begin to expand their horizons as individuals by deferring to magazines, and a vast array of media, including the internet, which is at thier disposal.

In a society as diverse as our own with far too little acceptance of that diversity, mixed messages thrive. At a time when these kids need to grow emotionally, there are far too few examples and role models to assist in directing that emotional growth.

In our world, especially in the urban areas, children are exposed to many aspects of life long before attaining an emotional ability to deal objectively with what they see and hear.

Emotional maturity is learned, but in the fast pace of a diverse urban society there are few opportunities and fewer role models and mentors from which to learn.