Cover the wound with long sleeves, then grasp the corner of the cuff with your hand, with your eyelids hanging down and glancing at one side indifferently; Or simply expose the scar, pull your hair and look upset, seemingly indifferent to the eyes of people around you. When these children walk into the consulting room, they often feel surprised and distressed.
It's hard to imagine these young children hurting their bodies again and again in bright or dark places: cutting, scalding, deliberately bumping, swallowing foreign objects or toxic substances ... not for death, but for their own bodies.
However, such things keep happening. The incidence of non-suicidal self-injury is relatively high among teenagers, and the worldwide incidence is about 14% ~ 56%(Waals L et al., 20 18). It is not uncommon in China. A meta-analysis of 20 18 shows that the incidence of self-injury is 20.6% for boys and 210.9% for girls in China, which seriously threatens children's physical and mental health (Lang et al., 20 18).
These self-injured children are likely to face other mental health problems at the same time, such as emotional disorders, eating disorders, borderline personality disorders, drug abuse and so on. In addition, although the motivation of non-suicidal self-injury behavior is not suicide, longitudinal studies have found that the suicide risk of self-injured parties is hundreds of times that of ordinary people, that is to say, these children may face much higher suicide risk than ordinary people.
What is the child's self-harm expressing?
When we learned that a child around us had self-harm behavior, when we first asked them, they probably just said "just upset", "just want to row" and "just want to show them" At this time, our panic and anger, coupled with children's secretive or indifferent attitude, often lead us to some accusing thoughts: that's what they do, they threaten us, and they are irresponsible for their own health. Therefore, self-harm behavior is often classified as "childish" and "weird".
However, things are by no means so simple. When a child has no choice or seems to have a choice to harm his body, he may have faced many difficulties.
1. They may want to get rid of some things, such as sadness or depression, guilt, shame, helplessness and despair.
These feelings may come from some bad thoughts and memories, but more often, children don't know what it comes from. These feelings are like a storm, which makes people unprepared. Time and time again, they use the little pleasure of endorphins released by pain to "escape" those depressed emotions.
2. They may have problems with their sense of reality, feel surrounded by emptiness, find it difficult to determine their real existence, feel numb, and no longer "really live". Hurting themselves can help them relive their sense of reality.
As a child once said, "I don't understand what went wrong in life." As if caught between life and death, I gradually lost my place. My thinking ability is losing, my feelings and consciousness are losing, and I and the world are losing. Everything will disappear, everything will disappear ... until the pain that hurts me pulls me back, and I can finally tell myself that I am standing on the ground again ... "