One quarter of teen girls self-harm: U.S. study

Up to 30 per cent of teenage girls in some parts of the United States say they have intentionally injured themselves without aiming to die by suicide, researchers have found.

About one in four adolescent girls deliberately harmed herself in the previous year, often by cutting or burning, compared to about one in 10 boys. The overall prevalence of selfharm was almost 18 per cent.

“These numbers are very high for both genders — that surprised me,” said Martin A. Monto, a sociologist at the University of Portland and lead author of the new research.

Monto and his colleagues drew on data from a risk behaviour survey administered by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2015. Their report, published online in the American Journal of Public Health, included almost 65,000 public high school students in 11 states.

Most previous studies have examined self-harm among adolescents only in developed countries, in general, or in American adolescents admitted to a clinical setting.

The results varied by race. More than 20 per cent of Native American students reported self-harm, followed by Hispanic, white and Asian students. Only 12 per cent of Black students reported selfinjury.

The behaviour also declined with age, from 19.4 per cent among 14-year-olds to 14.7 per cent among 18-year-olds.