There has been a surge in teenage girls’ self-harm in recent years, according to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Rates of self-inflicted injuries were relatively stable from 2001 until 2008 in the US, but since 2009, 5.7 percent more young people went to the emergency room for such injuries each year.
Hospital visits for self-harm have remained relatively stable for men between 10 and 24, but young women are intentionally hurting themselves more than ever.
The number of girls hospitalized each year for self-harm has climbed by nearly 20 percent each consecutive year since 2009, a staggering rise that prompted the researches to call for better strategies for prevention.
The CDC’s graph show the steep incline in girls who have self-harmed since 2009
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s latest data, published in JAMA, fit right into widely documented mental health trends: depression, anxiety and suicide rates are all up, across the board, but especially among teenage girls.
Self-harm statistics shed particular light on how young women may be affected differently by stimuli, especially in an increasingly social, connected world.
‘There is just more stimulation [now]. It’s a complicated environment and there are more demands on everyone, but teens are particularly vulnerable because of where they are developmentally and the way their neurology is changing,’ says Dr Janis Whitlock.
Dr Whitlock, director of Cornell University’s research program on self-injurious behaviors, says that the inability to ‘turn off’ and disconnect from the social media world may be disproportionately challenging to girls.
Social media, staring up from smart phone screens, is ‘constantly on and beckoning for some kind of response,’ she says. ‘The stakes feel very high, especially for girls who stake so much on how they’re viewed in the world.’
Dr Whitlock says that the pressure to be seen as perfect and body image issues often lead to self-harming patterns for girls.
She says that female social tendencies can also lend themselves to cyberbullying, especially among teens.
‘Girls tend to be more relationally aggressive than boys, and if that’s getting perpetuated online, and they can’t take a break and turn off, that can take a toll,’ says Dr Whitlock.
Between 2009 and 2015, the number of girls and women between 10 and 24 that visited an emergency department for self-inflicted medical issues grew 8.4 percent each year.
Dr Whitlock suggests that these increases may closely track cyberbullying and the proliferation of smart phones.
The Cyberbullying Research Center reported that in august of 2016, 33.8 percent of the more than 20,000 middle and high school students it surveyed had been bullied online. That number represents a 15 percent increase over the rate of cyberbullying in 2009.
‘People who self-harm have strong emotions, are more emotionally labile – up and down in their mood states over time,’ says Dr Whitlock. ‘They tend to be really affected by the different kinds of emotional messages that they are exposed to. Cyberbullying may very well put these kids over the edge,’ she says.
More and more young people are self-harming, especially teenage girls, according to new data from the CDC
She also postulates that it’s not so much the internet as it is the proliferation smart phones – ‘the 24/7-ness of it’ – that leads to an over-load of stressors.
‘If you can trace smart phones, especially as young people had them, I think that would predict [this data],’ Dr Whitlock says.
The CDC’s data show that hospital admissions for self-inflicted injuries or illnesses began to increase much more sharply around 2008 or 2009.
According to data from the Pew Research Center, by 2008, 71 percent of teens had cell phones, lagging only six percent behind adult ownership. By 2015, Pew reported that 73 percent of teens had access to a smart phone.
At the moment, Dr Whitlock says we can’t do much more than advise parents to have their teens turn off their smart phones and disconnect occasionally. But she recognizes the limitations of that approach, and cautions that regulation may become necessary. She says that regulations to protect teens might be akin to recent moves by Facebook and Reddit to police their own sites for fake news.
‘This could be something that some degree of AI could help us to do, to not become our very worst selves,’ she says.
‘We’re entering a time when things that used to shape the way we develop – like physical walls, the time of day, periods of life – where people young people were not likely to be exposed to so much adult material’ are falling away.
‘Like frogs in heating water, we’re starting to notice that it’s getting really hot in what feels like this cauldron of stimulus that is just getting bigger and more intense over time,’ says Dr Whitlock, ‘and our youngest and most vulnerable are the ones who will show the first signs of failure to thrive.’