At the end of last year, my students and I surveyed about 4500 New Zealanders on topics such as mental health, emotional lives and fun stuff like politics and personality. Over the next few weeks, I will write about some of the things our survey shows.
First, I’m going to talk about something I know a lot about. Self-injury. Since the early-2000s, there’s been an increase in the incidence of self-injury, and an explosion in research into it. Internationally, we’re confident there’s more of it than 20 years ago. As a result, research is even more important to inform how we support people who hurt themselves.
Research in this broad area often makes a distinction between non-suicidal self-injury, or NSSI, which involves deliberate harm to one’s body but without the intent to die, and self-harm, which includes those things but also harm that may not be directly physical, and may also involve intent to die.
We’ve looked at both of these things, but I’m focusing on NSSI.
Given our mental health statistics, it’s no surprise that we also tip the scales when it comes to NSSI. We’ve found that about half of our young people hurt themselves by school-leaving age, and more recently we’ve seen an increase in rates among young adults – rates of NSSI among university-age folk are up to about two-thirds.
Theories of why people engage in NSSI have several things in common. They typically propose that NSSI is preceded by something stressful, like a fight with your parents or friends, being bullied, or getting a lower-than-desirable grade. They also propose that people hurt themselves for a reason, serving psychological functions around managing emotions or our social environment. And they all imply or explicitly state that people are more likely to hurt themselves if they have fewer tools in their emotion regulation toolkit – the strategies we use to deal with unpleasant emotions.
It’s safe to say that the vast majority of what we know about NSSI, including these theories, is based on research with young people. And that makes sense, right, because they’re the ones we know are hurting themselves? This is kind of true, but we don’t actually know very much about NSSI among adults.
In our survey, we asked participants whether they had ever engaged in common forms of NSSI. Overall, we found a lower percentage had hurt themselves than we usually see – 25% of folk had hurt themselves in the past. When we break things down by age we see a bit of what we expect, as well as a bit of what we don’t.
Specifically, 62% of the youngest participants (aged under 25) have hurt themselves (25% in the past year), and this decreases in almost a straight line as people get older. At the other end, 13% of the over-60s report lifetime NSSI; 2% have done so in the past year. Self-injury is not just something young people do.
Remember I said that “we” think that self-injury is more common for people who have trouble regulating their emotions? People vary in their emotion regulation skills, but there’s also a developmental element – we learn it as we grow up. Young people are at a bit of a disadvantage here compared with adults, right?
In our survey, people who report more emotional dysregulation also report more self-injury, but again, we find age is important – dysregulation is a better predictor of youth NSSI than adult and older adult NSSI. And this rings alarm bells. Our theory and understanding of NSSI is being skewed by how we’ve studied it, and while we probably have a good handle on young people’s self-injury, I’m worried that we can’t assume that generalises to everyone.
If you, or someone you know, is concerned about self-injury, chat to your GP, a school counsellor or someone you trust.
Where to get help:
If it’s an emergency and you feel that you or someone else is at risk, call 111.
- Need to talk? Free call or text 1737 any time for support from a trained counsellor
- Suicide Crisis Helpline – 0508 828 865 (0508 TAUTOKO)
- Lifeline – 0800 543 354 (0800 LIFELINE) or free text 4357 (HELP)
- Youthline – 0800 376 633, free text 234 or email talk@youthline.co.nz or online chat
- 0800 What’s Up - 0800 942 8787
- Samaritans – 0800 726 666
- Depression Helpline: 0800 111 757 or free text 4202 to talk to a trained counsellor, or visit depression.org.nz
- Anxiety New Zealand - 0800 269 4389 (0800 ANXIETY)
- Healthline – 0800 611 116
- Additional specialist helpline links: https://www.mentalhealth.org.nz/get-help/in-crisis/helplines/
