Ten Things Your Reader Won’t Know About Self-inflicted injuries

blog for 3-29-2010

1. Fact or detail:
Ninety-six of 568 (16.9%) youth indicated that they had ever harmed themselves. Self-injuries such as cutting, scratching and self-hitting were the most common forms of nonsuicidal self-harm (83.2%).

Source information:
Nixon, M., Cloutier, P., & Jansson, S.. (2008). Nonsuicidal self-harm in youth: a population-based survey. Canadian Medical Association. Journal, 178(3), 306-12. Retrieved March 29, 2010, from ProQuest Health and Medical Complete. (Document ID: 1447230571).

2. Fact or detail:
The majority of those who self-harmed reported that the idea to self-harm had been their own (69/93, 73.4%). Few youths reported that they had gotten the idea from a friend (27/93, 29.0%), television or movies (14/93, 15.1%) or a family member (2/93, 2.2%), or that they had read about it (11/93, 11.8%). For the question "where did you get the idea to self-harm," the mean number of sources reported was 1.4 (SD 0.9).

Source information:
Nixon, M., Cloutier, P., & Jansson, S.. (2008). Nonsuicidal self-harm in youth: a population-based survey. Canadian Medical Association. Journal, 178(3), 306-12. Retrieved March 29, 2010, from ProQuest Health and Medical Complete. (Document ID: 1447230571).

3. Fact or detail:
"It's not a big issue for them. In fact, drawing a lot of attention to it probably isn't very helpful for someone that's done it once or twice, and is otherwise doing well and all their other behaviours are fine."
By comparison, teens who cut frequently are more likely to be doing it because they can't manage their feelings.

Source information:
David Hodges. (2005, June). Cutting the 'new tattoo' for teens. Medical Post, 41(22), 16. Retrieved March 29, 2010, from ProQuest Health and Medical Complete. (Document ID: 856698361).

4. Fact or detail:
The frequent cutters were more likely than the less frequent cutters to be female (62% vs. 42%), non-white (26% vs. 9%), sexually abused (63% vs. 43%), to have used condoms inconsistently (61% vs. 27%) and report less impulse control (36% vs. 29%).

Source information:
David Hodges. (2005, June). Cutting the 'new tattoo' for teens. Medical Post, 41(22), 16. Retrieved March 29, 2010, from ProQuest Health and Medical Complete. (Document ID: 856698361).

5. Fact or detail:
The researchers reported, "The lifetime prevalence rate of having greater than or equal to1 self-injurious behavior incident was 17.0%. Seventy-five percent of those students engaged in self- injurious behaviors more than once. Thirty-six percent reported that no one knew about their self-injurious behaviors and only 3.29% indicated that a physician knew.

Source information:
Mental Health; Self-injurious behaviors in a college population are examined. (2006, August). Medical Letter on the CDC & FDA,73. Retrieved March 29, 2010, from ProQuest Health and Medical Complete. (Document ID: 1086809671).


6. Fact or detail:
Compared with non-self-injurers, those with repeat self-injurious behavior incidents were more likely to be female, bisexual or questioning their sexual orientation. They were less likely to be Asian/Asian American and >24 years of age."

Source information:
Mental Health; Self-injurious behaviors in a college population are examined. (2006, August). Medical Letter on the CDC & FDA,73. Retrieved March 29, 2010, from ProQuest Health and Medical Complete. (Document ID: 1086809671).

7. Fact or detail:
Olfson et al examine national trends from 1990 - 2000 in the utilization of community hospital inpatient services by young people ages 5-20 years old with intentional self-inflicted injuries. After discussing the results, they conclude that young people admitted to community hospitals with self-inflicted injuries tended to have more severe psychiatric diagnoses and to be treated during shorter inpatient stays.

Source information:
Mark Olfson, Marc J Gameroff, Steven C Marcus, Ted Greenberg, & David Shaffer. (2005). National Trends in Hospitalization of Youth With Intentional Self-Inflicted Injuries. The American Journal of Psychiatry, 162(7), 1328-35. Retrieved March 29, 2010, from ProQuest Health and Medical Complete. (Document ID: 864283601).


8. Fact or detail:
The annual hospitalization rate of youths with self-inflicted injuries declined from 49.1 per 100,000 in 1990 to 44.9 per 100,000 in 2000, and the mean length of inpatient stay significantly declined from 3.6 days to 2.7 days. Among the hospitalized patients, there were increases in the rate of cutting (4.3% to 13.2%) and ingestion of acetaminophen (22.1% to 26.9%), antidepressants (10.0% to 14.0%), and opiates (2.3% to 3.3%) as a cause of injury, whereas there were decreases in the ingestion of salicylates (14.9% to 10.2%) and barbiturates (1.5% to 0.7%).

Source information:
Mark Olfson, Marc J Gameroff, Steven C Marcus, Ted Greenberg, & David Shaffer. (2005). National Trends in Hospitalization of Youth With Intentional Self-Inflicted Injuries. The American Journal of Psychiatry, 162(7), 1328-35. Retrieved March 29, 2010, from ProQuest Health and Medical Complete. (Document ID: 864283601).

9. Fact or detail:
The Self-Inflicted Injury Severity Form (SIISF) was developed as an epidemiological research tool for identifying individuals in hospital emergency departments who have lifethreatening self-inflicted injuries.

Source information:
Lloyd B Potter, Marcie-jo Kresnow, Kenneth E Powell, Patrick W O'Carroll, & et al. (1998). Identification of nearly fatal suicide attempts: Self-inflicted injury severity form. Suicide & Life - Threatening Behavior, 28(2), 174-186. Retrieved March 30, 2010, from ProQuest Health and Medical Complete. (Document ID: 32279840).


10. Fact or detail:
We sought to identify cases of attempted suicide who would have died from suiciderelated injuries had they not received rapid and effective prehospital care or other emergency treatment. Research has shown that medically serious suicide attempters are epidemiologically similar to suicide completers (Rosen,1970), and serious suicide attempters are at twice the risk of subsequent completed suicide as other suicide attempters (Rosen, 1976). Therefore, we sought a method for case identification which could identify these life-endangered cases of attempted suicide, and which could be reliably and rapidly used in a hospital emergency department setting. We then validated this method of case identification as a means of identifying a living population of suicide attempters with life-threatening self-inflicted injuries (Carmines & Zeller 1979).

Source information:
Lloyd B Potter, Marcie-jo Kresnow, Kenneth E Powell, Patrick W O'Carroll, & et al. (1998). Identification of nearly fatal suicide attempts: Self-inflicted injury severity form. Suicide & Life - Threatening Behavior, 28(2), 174-186. Retrieved March 30, 2010, from ProQuest Health and Medical Complete. (Document ID: 32279840).