Self-Harm in Adolescence as Maladaptive Coping
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18662/brain/11.2Sup1/92Keywords:
self-harm, adolescence, prevalence, formsAbstract
Psychologists, psychiatrists, doctors, and other associated professions, as well as the public from all over Europe have noticed the negative impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on mental health. In this regard, adolescents appear to be a highly vulnerable group, which is more affected than adults and children in many aspects. This study focuses on a specific and extremely maladaptive way of coping with mental stress and problems – deliberate self-harm. It offers an epidemiological study of the prevalence of self-harm among Slovak youths, its forms and related variables, carried out on a sample of 2,280 adolescents aged 11 – 19 using the SHI questionnaire. The results reveal that within the overall prevalence of 45.2%, the most vulnerable group are girls from non-traditional families who began to self-harm at an early age. The most frequent forms of self-harm among adolescents were torturing with self-defeating thoughts, followed by both direct and indirect forms of physical self-harm. An analysis of the willingness to disclose self-harming behaviour shows that the need to raise awareness of this behaviour should be mostly oriented towards adolescents.
References
Aaro, L. E. (2007). Adolescent Lifestyles. In S. Ayers, A. Baum, C. McManus, S. Newman, K. Wallston, J. Weinman, & R. West (Eds.), Cambridge Handbook of Psychology, Health and Medicine (pp. 5-9). Cambridge University Press.
Bonnie, R. J., & Backes, E. P. (2019). The Promise of Adolescence. Realizing Opportunity for All Youth. Washington: The National Academies Press.
Casey, B. J., Duhoux, S., & Malter Cohen, M. (2010). Adolescence: What do Transmission, Transition, and Translation Have to do with it? Neuron, 67(5), 749-760. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2010.08.033
Clarke, S., Allerhand, L. A., & Berk, M. S. (2019). Recent Advances in Understanding and Managing Self-harm in Adolescents. F1000Research, 8, Faculty Rev-1794. https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.19868.1
Demuthova, S., & Doktorova, D. (2018). Interpohlavne rozdiely v prevalencii jednotlivych foriem sebaposkodzovania u adolescentov [Gender Differences in the Prevalence of Individual Forms of Self-harm in Adolescents]. In Kondasove dni 2018 (pp. 19-23). FF UCM.
DSM-5 (2013). Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th ed). American Psychiatric Publishing.
Hawton, J. C., Saunders, E. A., & O’Connor, R. (2012). Self-harm and Suicide in Adolescents. Lancet, 379, 2372-2382. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(12)60322-5
Jager, J., Yuen, C. X., Putnick, D. L., Hendricks, C., & Bornstein, M. H. (2015). Adolescent-Peer Relationships, Separation and Detachment from Parents, and Internalizing and Externalizing Behaviors: Linkages and Interactions. The Journal of Early Adolescence, 35(4), 511-537. https://doi.org/10.1177/0272431614537116
Jung, K. Y., Kim, T., Hwang, S. Y., Lee, T. R., Yoon, H., Shin, T. G., Sim, M. S., Cha, W. C., & Jeon, H. J. (2018). Deliberate Self-harm among Young People Begins to Increase at the Very Early Age: A Nationwide Study. Journal of Korean Medical Science, 33(30), e191. https://doi.org/10.3346/jkms.2018.33.e191
Klonsky, E. D. (2007). The Functions of Deliberate Self-injury: A Review of the Evidence. Clinical Psychology Review, 27(2), 226-239. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2006.08.002
Larson, R. W., Moneta, G., Richards, M. H., & Wilson, S. (2002). Continuity, Stability, and Change in Daily Emotional Experience Across Adolescence. Child Development, 73(4), 1151-1165.
Laye-Gindhu, A., & Schonert-Reichl, K. A. (2005). Nonsuicidal Self-harm among Community Adolescents: Understanding the “Whats” and “Whys” of Self-harm. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 34(5), 447-457. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-005-7262-z
Lundh, L. G., Karim, J., & Quilisch, E. (2007). Deliberate Self-harm in 15-year-old Adolescents: A Pilot Study with a Modified Version of the Deliberate Self-Harm Inventory. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 48, 33-41. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9450.2007.00567.x
Madge, N., Hewitt, A., Hawton, K., de Wilde, E. J., Corcoran, P., Fekete, S., Van Heeringen, K., De Leo, D., & Ystgaard, M. (2008). Deliberate Self-harm within an International Community Sample of Young People: Comparative Findings from the Child & Adolescent Self-harm in Europe (CASE) Study. The Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 49, 667-677. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-7610.2008.01879.x
Moran, P., Coffey, C., Romaniuk, H., Olsson, C., Borschmann, R., Carlin, J. B., & Patton, G. C. (2012). The Natural History of Self-harm from Adolescence to Young Adulthood: A Population-based Cohort Study. Lancet, 379(9812), 236-243. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(11)61141-0
Petermann, F., & Nitkowski, D. (2015). Selbstverletzendes Verhalten. Erscheinungsformen, Ursachen und Interventionsmöglichkeiten (3 überarb). Hogrefe.
Pfeifer, J. H., & Berkman, E. T. (2018). The Development of Self and Identity in Adolescence: Neural Evidence and Implications for a Value-Based Choice Perspective on Motivated Behavior. Child development perspectives, 12(3), 158-164. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdep.12279
Plener, P. L., Libal, G., Keller, F., Fegert, J. M., & Muehlenkamp, J. J. (2009). An International Comparison of Adolescent Non-Suicidal Self-injury (NSSI) and Suicide Attempts: Germany and the USA. Psychological Medicine, 39(9), 1549-1558. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0033291708005114
Sansone, R. D., & Sansone, L. A. (2010). Measuring Self-harm Behavior with the Self-Harm Inventory. Psychiatry, 7(4), 16-20.
Tormoen, A. J., Rossow, I., Larsson, B. & Mehlum, L. (2013). Nonsuicidal Self-harm and Suicide Attempts in Adolescents: Differences in Kind or in Degree. Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, 48(9), 1447-1455. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00127-012-0646-y
Saha, K., Torous, J., Ernala, S. K., Rizuto, C., Stafford, A., & De Choudhury, M. (2019). A computational study of mental health awareness campaigns on social media. Translational Behavioral Medicine, 9(6), 1197-1207. https://doi.org/10.1093/tbm/ibz028
St Germain, S. A., & Hooley, J. M. (2012). Direct and Indirect Forms of Non-Suicidal Self-injury: Evidence for a Distinction. Psychiatry Research, 197(1-2), 78-84. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychres.2011.12.050
Swahn, M. H., Ali, B., Bossarte, R. M., Van Dulmen, M., Crosby, A., Jones, A. C., & Schinka, K. C. (2012). Self-harm and Suicide Attempts among High-risk, Urban Youth in the U.S.: Shared and Unique Risk and Protective Factors. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 9(1), 178-191. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph9010178
Victor, S. E., Glenn, C. R., & Klonsky, E. D. (2012). Is Non-Suicidal Self-injury an "Addiction"? A Comparison of Craving in Substance Use and Non-Suicidal Self-injury. Psychiatry Research, 197(1-2), 73-77. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychres.2011.12.011
Victor, S. E., Muehlenkamp, J. J., Hayes, N. A., Lengel, G. J., Styer, D. M., & Washburn, J. J. (2018). Characterizing gender differences in nonsuicidal self-injury: Evidence from a large clinical sample of adolescents and adults. Comprehensive psychiatry, 82, 53-60. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.comppsych.2018.01.009
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2020 The Authors & LUMEN Publishing House

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant this journal right of first publication, with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work, with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g. post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g. in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as an earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).
BRAIN. Broad Research in Artificial Intelligence and Neuroscience Journal has an Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs
CC BY-NC-ND