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One in 12 teens intentionally self-harms
Last reviewed: 01.07.2025
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One in 12 adolescents, mostly girls, intentionally harm themselves by cutting, burning, overdosing on medications, or engaging in life-threatening behavior. About 10% of them continue to intentionally harm themselves as young adults.
Because self-harm is one of the strongest predictors of suicide, the psychiatrists who conducted the study hope the findings will help mobilize more aggressive and earlier diagnosis and treatment of people at risk.
"The numbers we're talking about here are huge," said Keith Haughton of the Centre for Suicide Research at Oxford University in Britain, who reviewed the findings at a briefing in London, UK.
George Patton, one of the study's authors from the Centre for Adolescent Health in Australia, said the findings revealed a "window of vulnerability" for young people who often deal with their emotional problems by inflicting physical pain.
Their report, published in the medical journal The Lancet, said teenagers who self-harm often have underlying mental health problems that need to be addressed through treatment.
"Because of the association between self-harm and suicide, treatment of common mental disorders in adolescence may represent an important component of youth suicide prevention," they said.
Self-harm is a global health problem, particularly prevalent among girls and women aged 15 to 24. According to the World Health Organization, nearly one million people die by suicide each year, equivalent to one death every 40 seconds. Suicide rates have increased by 60% worldwide in the past 45 years.
In this study, Patton and Paul Moran of the Institute of Psychiatry (Australia) examined samples of young people in Victoria aged 15 to 29 years between 1992 and 2008.
The study involved 1,802 people, of whom 8% reported self-harm. Girls were more likely to intentionally harm themselves than boys - 10% and 6% respectively.
Moran attributes this behavior to a combination of hormonal changes during puberty and changes in the brain, particularly the prefrontal cortex, which is associated with planning, expressing individuality, and modeling behavior.
By the time the participants reached adulthood, self-harm had declined dramatically: at age 29, less than 1% of participants reported self-harm.
This decline in incidence over time "should not lead us to believe that self-harm is just a developmental phase of adolescence."
Unfortunately, the experience of many studies shows an alarming trend of increasing numbers of people who harm themselves.
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