‘I feel relieved and less anxious after I cut. The emotional pain slowly slips away into the physical pain.”1 This is one young person’s explanation for deliberately and repeatedly injuring his own body.2 Princess Diana, in 1996, said, by way of explanation, “[y]ou have so much pain inside yourself, you try and hurt yourself on the outside because you need help.”3 Some other reasons given by young people include that “it reduces their anxiety, it allows them to feel a sense of control over their bodies when they believe they have no other control over their lives, it expresses emotional pain for which they have no words or that pain is better than feeling nothing.”4
Mental health, school professionals and the media have become well versed in teenage self-injury, which, according to experts, is a “disturbing and hard-to-treat phenomenon” that is “increasing among adolescents, college students and young adults.”5 Lawyers and judges working with families on cases in a variety of contexts must understand these behaviors, too, in order to work successfully in an interdisciplinary manner with other professionals. These young people described in this article can be children of divorce and separation, victims of child abuse or other trauma, youths with a variety of mental illnesses and victims of other difficult circumstances.
What Is Self-Injury?
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