| ■ Self-Harm Not Limited to Teen Girls: Survey | 2008.12.22 |
| Self-harm isn't a problem limited to teenage girls, suggests a survey by the British mental health group Sane. The survey of nearly 1,000 people with a history of self-harm found that more than 10 percent of respondents were male and that some respondents didn't start harming themselves until they were in their 50s, BBC News reported. About 84 percent said they tried to hide their behavior from their family and 66 percent tried to hide it from friends. Many inflicted damage to a part of their body that was easy to conceal from others or where the injury could be easily explained away as an accident. Only about 12 percent of respondents said their first act of self-harm was motivated by a desire for attention, and this decreased to about 8 percent for subsequent acts of self-harm, BBC News reported. The findings show that a wide range of people inflict self-harm, said Marjorie Wallace, chief executive of Sane. |