Self harm in teenagers

(Signature of a student) Date. TABLE OF CONTENTS Declaration form……………………………………………………………………………ii Abstract ……………………………………………………………………………………iii Introduction………………………………………………………………………………1. 0 Literature Review……………………………………………………. 0 Introduction …………………………………………………………………………. pg8 2. 1 General characteristics of respondents…………………………………………. pg15 4. 2 Findings……………………………………………………………………………pg18 4. 3 Discussions…………………………………………………………………………pg19 4. 4 Possible solutions to self-harm…………………………………………………. 0 Introduction Self-injury is when an individual intentionally inflicts pain or harm to the body to ease emotions that he/she is going through. Even though various communal groups and cultures not only in Hong Kong but also all over the work have different perspectives on self-injury, Self-harm has become more prevalent in young population especially adolescents today. Depending on emotional levels, depression and stressful environment, self-harm often undertakes varied forms in teenagers such as cuttings, hitting, abrasions, head banging, scratching and bruising, a times to extreme emotions may lead to suicide behaviour among adolescents like oral ingestion of poisonous drugs such as pesticides.

Young population especially those ranging from the age of 12 to 18 years are often the victims of self-harm since they are in the most crucial stages of adolescence in terms of both physical and biological changes in as far as development and growth is concerned1. As a result most of them are unable to control their emotions hence tending to act out of depressions, anger and stress disorders. Childhood trauma is predominantly characterized by varied predisposing factors which can trigger deliberate infliction of pain or harm at such a tender age, and the association of predisposing factors possesses a long past with evidence (Gratz, 2006; Klonsky et al. , 2003; Turell & Armsworth, 2003). For instance it is evident that if a child at a tender age grow all through the entire teenage life in a violent and harsh environment, the child develops trauma because of the unconducive environment, and the presence of childhood trauma as has been illustrated in the studies done to cause intended self-harm in childhood and even adulthood (Herman, J.

L. et al, 1989). C. Brown et al (2017), social media plays an important role in creating an interaction platform for people to share their experiences especially adolescents. The results from their studies suggested that many of the adolescents release their emotions in the social media by sharing their experiences and eventually gaining relieve. Their studies suggested that rapid spread and enormous use of internet especially social media by adolescents has positive impacts in relation to self-injury since the victims of the practice are able to gather information on how to manage and control their emotions. Therefore adolescents gather information from website information, blogs, and YouTube posts which they find it helpful to their problems, thus offer them a clinical challenge2. Adolescents undergo a lot of emotional swings which in turn lead to mental disorders, anxiety, anger, depressions, and stress.

Self-harm is a no suicidal act of releasing emotions by adolescents but times if not treated for instance through counseling it may lead to even to death. Effects of self-harm are categorized as physical and psychological. Data from Victoria healthy youth survey indicates that 16. 9 percent of youths aged between 14 to 20 years in Victoria, British Colombia has ever injured themselves and most of the self-injuries include cutting, scratching and hitting which constitutes 83 percent of the incidents reported (Nixon, M. In the study, cognitive-emotional model is used to give an explanation why people self-injure especially the adolescents. By keenly assessing the behavioral changes of the adolescents and young adult population, one can determine how they regulate their emotions and those cognitions such as expectancies and self-efficacy in mediating the impact of the social environment on their behavior (Heilbron and Prinstein, 2008).

Teenagers prompt to engage in non-suicidal self-injury because of low or weaker emotion regulation strategy and hence direct peer influence is suggested to be one of the vulnerable factors in particular leading to young population engagement in self-harm (Nock and Favazza, 2009). Therefore this model explains that how adolescents’ response to social environment emotionally as well as their cognition state matters a lot as far as engagement in self-harm. For instance cognitive- emotion model is purposely aimed at developing solutions and options on how people should to avoid specific self-injurious behaviour as emotional cascades on dysregulated behaviours such as substance use. The questionnaire was administered randomly to those willing to share information or have previous experience in self-injury practice to test the reliability of the research instruments.

The questionnaire was then administered to the same sample on two different occasions within a span of two weeks. 4 Ethical Consideration The information obtained from the study was held confidential and respondent privacy was upheld. Firstly, the consent of every respondent was sorted. At the beginning of every interview, the purpose of the research was clearly stated. Majority of the respondent in this study were aged 20 years of age and below which account for about 63. 8% and the remaining 36. 2% was shared by respondents of 20 years and above. The main reason why the younger ones dominated the results is that they possess enough information and they are equally largely affected population by self-harm. The study envisaged to establish the background information of the respondents.

desperations mostly come up due to breakups of relationships among the teens. this hits them lowering their self-esteem and making them feel unwanted in that scenario. Another finding is that both the parents, teachers, and victims of self-harm do not have adequate knowledge and awareness about self-harm. While in the field, most of the respondents shy off and neglected to fill the questionnaires simply because of no clue about what self-harm is. Poor family relations is one of the findings which results in self-hatred, anger, stress and disrespectful behavior of the teenagers. Most of the teens engage in sex because of the internet influence. As per the findings of the research, it’s of significant importance to educate both the teenagers and adults about self-harm.

When adolescents are educated they will be able to under the mixed reactions going on in their bodies during the developmental stages of adolescence and thus manage to control over those reactions. In addition, making parents or guardians aware of self-harm, how to accommodate, sustain and create a conducive growing environment for their young ones during adolescent's development. This is because, at adolescence, children tend to be so moody and undergo fluctuating behavior changes which as a parent you need to accommodate and sustain them. Hence, calls for need to raise awareness of self-injury and potential risk factors such as low mood, bullying, drug abuse and internet among others which are in contact with young adolescents in school and back in the community.