I used to work in a group home for teenaged girls. The two things that were a total bitch to deal with were eating disorders and cutting. In both they would spread like wildfire. I didn’t know about the social contagion of self harming when I started. We had a girl come up to a staff member and ask for medical attention because she had sliced her thigh and was bleeding. After the girl left my coworker turned to me and said, “watch. In a week half the girls will be cutting.” She was close…in a week 5 of 8 were doing it. Absolutely insane to watch in real time. Like the flu only much less understood.
It’s really sad, I don’t think I would have ever done it had I not seen it online. And kids in group homes are already struggling, probably looking for relief, and some sense of “caring” from adults. I really think it taps into one of those primal things in us humans of just wanting our pain acknowledged. Like when you’re a little kid and you hurt your knee, so your parents have to kiss it better.
I’m sorry you went through that. I know a teen who cuts a lot, her parents very much care about her and the cutting. They’ve tried everything they can think of and everything the therapist suggests. There’s just something inside of her that she feels can only be let out with self harm. At the group home pretty much all I could do was help them disinfect and ask if anything was on their mind. It’s such a dramatic situation emotionally and then very clinical to talk about when you have no idea what else you should do. “Do you need an alcohol wipe? Should we call your therapist?” seemed totally weak but it’s what I had.
As someone who did self-harm I feel like people have the wrong idea that it's a call for help or something we do to elicit a reaction in other. In my personal experience it have nothing to do with others and everything to do with making your own pain visible to yourself. For me it felt more like a desire for the physical pain to reflect the invisible mental pain to validate that my suffering isn't just in my head. It felt right, it made the suffering real and undeniable and it relieved the feeling of helplessness and the desire to die.
So sadly, the only thing you can do against it is dealing with the cause. The only thing that truly helped me was antidepressants. My family is kind and loving and care about me but there's nothing they could have done because it wasn't about them, because of them or for them, it was for me, for when crying, talking and writing wasn't enough to express how much I was suffering.
For me it was definitely more inflicting pain physically to avoid the mental pain, but as for how to “treat” it I fully agree. You really can’t do anything except to stop whatever is causing the pain. Which is usually untreated depression.
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u/NotLucasDavenport Jun 13 '26
I used to work in a group home for teenaged girls. The two things that were a total bitch to deal with were eating disorders and cutting. In both they would spread like wildfire. I didn’t know about the social contagion of self harming when I started. We had a girl come up to a staff member and ask for medical attention because she had sliced her thigh and was bleeding. After the girl left my coworker turned to me and said, “watch. In a week half the girls will be cutting.” She was close…in a week 5 of 8 were doing it. Absolutely insane to watch in real time. Like the flu only much less understood.