According to media reports, one in four teenage girls in the UK are self-harming, motivated by sexist stereotypes and pressures to look good in a selfie society. The suggest an epidemic among our nation鈥檚 youth, but the truth may not be as bleak as it first appears.
The stories came from a report by UK charity The Children鈥檚 Society, based on an ongoing survey of 11,000 children aged 14, called the .
Among the girls, 22 per cent said they had self-harmed 鈥� not quite the one-in-four figure from the headlines, although close. For boys it was 9 per cent.
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But while the term self-harm conjures images of teenagers cutting themselves, that may, thankfully, be only the most extreme end of a spectrum. In this survey, participants were merely asked if they had 鈥渉urt themselves on purpose in any way鈥�.
Some could have answered yes for things like punching a wall in frustration or deliberately getting falling-down drunk. Others could have thought the question included mental hurt 鈥� such as spending a miserable evening stalking an ex on social media. They needed to have done something like that just once in the past year for it to count.
Such self-destructive behaviour would naturally be of concern to parents, but wouldn鈥檛 be that unusual for teenagers. Max Davie, a health promotion officer for the UK鈥檚 Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, does believe that self-harm among teens is somewhat on the rise 鈥� but thinks the question in this survey was not specific enough to reveal its real prevalence.
Teenage happiness
The latest headlines join an ongoing narrative about a mental health crisis in today鈥檚 youth. Some blame cutbacks in social services, while others point to a loosening of sexual norms 聽putting teens at risk. For those wary of new technologies, it is social media or the latest popular computer games.
But such reports also deserve some scepticism. Claims of soaring rates of depression are usually based on surveys with very loose, non-medical criteria. Teenagers have always been sad or anxious from time to time 鈥� thankfully, clinical depression is still rare in this age group.
In fact, a different and regularly repeated survey has found no change in 11-to-15-year-olds鈥� happiness with life as whole between 1995 and 2016. Nor was there a change in satisfaction with their appearance 鈥� which makes it odd to blame the selfie culture for the apparent self-harm epidemic.
This survey, called Understanding Society, even found a boost in happiness with family and schoolwork over that period. These more optimistic findings were also in the latest Children鈥檚 Society report, but were buried at the bottom of their .
Davie thinks the rise in self-harm may not be due to a rise in unhappiness, but simply that this age group now sees it as a more culturally acceptable way to express anguish. 鈥淚t may be that previously people didn鈥檛 know that this was something you could do. If people are talking about something and normalising it, it鈥檚 probably more likely that their peers will do it.鈥�
If that is the case, it is all the more reason not to make self-harm seem more common than it really is. Scaremongering also detracts from a genuine problem that concerns psychiatrists much more 鈥� several years of National Health Service cutbacks mean young people who are severely mentally ill can wait many months for treatment or have to travel hundreds of miles for a hospital bed. That鈥檚 the real teenage mental health crisis.
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