The rise in selfharming hurts us all

Self-harm is on the rise among young teenage girls. They are cutting themselves, poisoning themselves, drawing blood because they can’t shed tears, crying for help up in their bedrooms where no one can hear them.

The figures are stark, unambiguous, shocking; a 70 per cent rise since 2011, according to GP figures. Six years ago, 46 girls per 10,000 harmed themselves. By 2014, that was up to 77 per 10,000.

Of these, 80 per cent were “selfpoisoning” – that’s an overdose to you and me. Not a suicide attempt, an existential scream that we must heed.

Psychiatrists have described this worrying rise as “heartbreaking”. I would add frightening, devastating and a terrible indictment of the way in which idle entertainment – chat to your friends, stay in touch, swap pictures – has morphed into a malign threat to a generation.

Girls are worst affected by self-harm because they are more influenced by the echo chambers and distorting mirrors of social media, say experts.

Confronted by falsified images of unattainable perfection and dazzling social lives, teenagers struggling to find their place, their identity, can feel so overwhelmed that a numbness takes over; that’s when they take a razor to their inner thigh. Just to feel something. Anything.

Paradoxical though it sounds, girls hurt their bodies as a way of tranquillising their minds; physical pain distracts from psychological torment. Then comes an endorphin rush; a tiny hit of pleasure that can turn into addictive gratification.

As the mother of two daughters aged 15 and nine, I feel particularly anguished. I know only too well the bluster girls hide behind. Even as the elder one and her friends would gallop up and down the stairs, shriek for hours on the trampoline and wolf down every biscuit in the house, I had some inkling of just how fragile they really were.

Together, shouting and laughing and arguing, they looked like strong young women. But alone, online they were vulnerable kids. Who could guess their self-esteem is dependent on Snapchat messages, their sense of worth bound up with Instagram likes?

My own girlfriends and I had forgotten about the highs and lows of teenagedom until we ourselves became parents – the euphoria, the moodiness, the inexplicable tears and abrupt door-slamming temper.

However did we (and, looking back, our parents) survive it?

We got through it alone and certainly never talked to our parents or each other. That silence might not have done us much good at the time, but it didn’t do us any (self) harm.

Experts today claim that it is the connectedness of young people that is fuelling this insane mania for cutting.

Girls may not mean to egg another on, but they can’t help but give one another a sort of twisted support that magnifies their sense of hopelessness and legitimises the terrible damage they feel drawn into doing. In selfselecting chat rooms where anorexia is accepted and bulimia is normalised, girls can lose a sense of perspective. When comparing scars becomes the foundation of online friendships, the consequences are too terrible to imagine.

Thanks to campaigners such as Princes William and Harry, a raft of high-profile celebrities and my colleague Bryony Gordon, a spotlight is now shining on the darkness of mental health in our society.

But young girls are far more invested in the online world where the pressure to keep up the conversation, keep up the front and show no weakness is relentless. Is it any wonder they buckle beneath the weight of perceived expectation?

We urgently need a shift in mindset. This week saw an outdoors nursery named as the best in Britain. At Dandelion Education in Norfolk, children are expected to make, build and devise their own toys and are not permitted indoors; there’s a yurt in the event of hurricanes. It’s the stuff of

Swallows and Amazons fantasy. These children may not be terribly well versed in the Cbeebies schedule or how to Google, but they will emerge with that most precious of commodities: resilience.

When those all-terrain tots are eventually being allowed inside long enough to be accepted into Cambridge University, I don’t think they will be the ones needing snowflake warnings that (brace yourself) Shakespeare contains violence and sexism.

Your son or daughter can be introvert or extrovert, a maths geek or a performing butterfly, thrusting entrepreneur or gentle animal lover, but the one factor that unites successful people in this world is resilience.

Or, as Winston Churchill put it: “Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.”

As parents, we have a duty to instil can-do courage into our children of all ages, whether by letting them play in the rain, undergo a regular digital detox or earn their own pocket money.

Like every parent, I want my children to go out into the world and be successful, by which I don’t mean achieving Kardashian fame or Olympic glory or Ecclestone wealth, but happiness.

Is there any other real measure of success? I can’t think of a single one. But first comes resilience – that unshakeable sense of self that can deal with other people’s gorgeous Instagram shots, a blood-spattered production of Coriolanus, or even just a common or garden downpour.

So what do we do? It is up to us, the adults, to set the agenda and recalibrate the emotional thermometer. When mothers like me – including me – wail “but my daughter will die without her phone”, what we actually mean is “my daughter will turn into an angry monster without her phone”. But that is no reason not to take it away from her for several hours a day, especially at bedtime.

It’s parenthood; nobody claimed it would be easy. It’s our job to raise our teenagers, not outsource them to the mass hysteria of strangers on social media where nobody actually gives a damn about them and the distress is unbearable.

Our children are the future. When a wretched young girl cuts herself in her bedroom or downs paracetamol, doctors might call it self-harm, but make no mistake: it harms us all.