New Risk Factors For Teen Self Harm

Main Category: Pediatrics / Children's Health
Also Included In: Psychology / Psychiatry
Article Date: 19 May 2009 - 8:00 PDT

A lack of emotional intelligence leads to poor coping strategies and seriously increases the likelihood of self-harm in teenagers, claims a study published yesterday, in the British Journal of Clinical Psychology.

The study, carried out by Moira Mikolajczak from the Universite Catholique de Louvain, Belgium, K. V. Petrides from the London Psychometric Laboratory at University College London and Jane Hurry from the Institute of Education examined the levels of self harm, emotional intelligence and coping strategies of 490 British secondary school pupils.

Dr Petrides said: "People who turn to self harm claim to do so to regulate their emotions, which indicates that they cannot manage their feelings in a healthy way. We wanted to better understand the underlying psychological issues that lead adolescents to harm themselves."

Of the 490 students who took part, 132 (27 per cent) reported having deliberately self harmed, either hitting or cutting themselves or taking an overdose of recreational drugs. 65 per cent of self harmers were found to have mild to severe symptoms of depression.

"We found that teenagers who self harmed had both significantly lower scores on a measure of emotional intelligence and were more likely to use maladaptive coping strategies such as self criticism or self blame. This suggests that self harm is a desperate attempt to reduce the negative feelings that are worsened by their poor and ineffective emotional coping strategies."

"However efficient self harm may be at reducing negative emotions in the short term, this is at the cost of serious physical injury and longer term psychological problems. These findings will help us develop coaching programmes for the treatment of self harm patients that focus on developing both better methods of coping and boosting emotional intelligence."

Source
British Psychological Society