Word: self
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Once they were aware of the trend, Shiels and his colleagues analyzed the patients' medical records, finding consistent histories of self-injury and mental-health problems. There are numerous psychological and emotional factors that drive people to self-harm, but according to Harvard psychology professor Matthew Nock, who specializes in the study of self-injurious behavior and edited a book on the subject, Understanding Non-Suicidal Self-Injury (due March 2009), many do it for two broad reasons: to regulate their emotions and to communicate with others. "Self-injurers experience greater physiological arousal in response to stress, show poor ability...
...Shiels first introduced to the hospital in 1995, Young realized that some of the patients hadn't injured themselves accidentally. Unlike the majority of people who came in for treatment - for stepping on a piece of glass or being impaled by a particularly large splinter - these patients' wounds were self-inflicted. "I started to see three or four instances where the foreign-body cases were not accidental," he says. "I started to think it was a little strange and mentioned it to Dr. Shiels...
...three more patients came to Nationwide with similar wounds. For Shiels and Young, it became clear that they were on to something. The following summer, Shiels, Young (who graduated from Miami University in Ohio) and three others worked their way through the data, unearthing cases of self-embedding going back to 2005. They also discovered that the majority of patients who harmed themselves in this way did so more than once - the average recurrence was three times - and that the materials embedded under the skin varied dramatically in size, from several unfolded staples embedded into a hand...
...frenzy on the Internet, with stories cropping up one after the other and chatter lighting up on blogs. But as the news spread, globally even, some mental-health professionals grew wary. Without discounting the severity of the problem - particularly among adolescent girls - some experts felt the headlines declaring self-embedding a new "disorder" went too far. Characterizing it as a disorder rather than a symptom of one may miss the mark, says Dr. John Campo, chief of child and adolescent psychiatry at Nationwide Children's and one of the specialists consulted by Shiels. "Young people with a variety of different...
Nock believes self-embedding is a dangerous evolution, but says it is not unique. "I view this as a more severe variation of self-injury," he says. An analysis of the data Nock has compiled in his years of research reveals that some 10% to 20% of adolescents who injure themselves have inserted objects beneath their skin. None of those patients reported leaving the objects there, however, and only two out of 12 patients who reported doing so had to seek medical treatment as a result. "The fact that kids are inserting things under their skin is not necessarily...