Cutting

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Cutting
In-depth
Anastasia Tompkins
March 22, 2005












By Anastasia Tompkins ‘06
Cutting is an on-going epidemic of usually younger people inflicting harm upon themselves.
Of the three million sufferers, the target age is teenagers, but many self-injurers are well into their twenties. Generally by the age of 30, the self-harm has ceased. The age of this "trend" seems to hold importance in that teenagers only inflict pain upon themselves because it is difficult being a teenager or it is "just a phase." Due to the evidence of this occurring in even the late twenties, the theory of cutting solely because of age is invalid.
Despite what the general consensus says, it is not always easy to pinpoint a cutter. Many are extremely difficult to find because they are considered normal. They may get straight A's, wear non-attention getting apparel, and have many friends. A popular trait in a cutter's personality is the need for control. Not dissimilar to an eating disorder, a cutter may lose control and find that he has regained control through self-infliction.
“After my parents got divorced and my sister said I wasn’t allowed to see my nephew, the small problems kept building and building until I just went insane. I started out itching my arm until I felt enough pain to sustain me. Later on, I used a razor. Some of the control that I lost slowly came back,” Jessica Foster, a cutter since the age of 12, said.
Another common trait is the feeling of numbness. One may discover after a period of time he has lost significant feeling toward life. By self-harm, one feels emotion -- even if the emotion is a detrimental one. For example, a person could experience the death of a loved one and stop feeling as "alive" as he did prior to the death. In order to attain the feeling of liveliness, one might scratch themselves until blood is drawn.
"I had felt really bad for a really long time when I started. I just had this urge to
hurt myself, I wanted to feel pain. Then it just became a magic solution to any little problem," a female cutter said.
Anger is a typical cause, as well. Due to the lack of an emotional outlet, a self-injurer finds that harming himself provides the outlet needed and continues to do so whenever he feels compelled. Although cutting is not necessarily an addiction, stopping is said to be very convoluted. Once cutting has been established as the only means to cope with stress, discovering other means becomes twice as difficult to a cutter as to an emotionally-stable person.
In many occurrences, a mental disorder accompanies the cutting episodes. The common disorders are borderline disorder, bipolar disorder, psychosis or even eating disorders. The more general term for borderline and bipolar is depression. The symptoms are perpetual sadness and anxiety, a significant change in his eating patterns and/or sleeping patterns, ignoring his friends, rebellious behavior, complaints of pains in the stomach or lower back, abuse of alcohol or drugs, and a fascination with death. Although borderline disorder may only contain a few of these symptoms, it must be looked at just as seriously.
The key to borderline personality disorder, generally speaking, is the fear of being abandoned. Sufferers of this disorder often have “stormy” relations with friends, family and significant others. The constant fear of being abandoned may or may not be an actuality. Due to the unstable fragility of the mind of a person with borderline disorder, the loss of reality is common. Being unsound or unsure of one’s self-image is also a characteristic of borderline disorder. Teenagers have enough trouble accepting who they are without influences from society and mental instabilities. Given that fact, cutting is most commonly found in the adolescence phase.
Bipolar disorder (or manic depression) is characterized by extreme mood swings from elation to depression. The mood changes can happen in a day’s time or within a few hours. In order to diagnose the problem as manic depression, the person must have dealt with the mood swings a week prior. As the cause is not exactly defined, psychologists believe it is the product of an imbalance of neurotransmitters. These chemicals control the mood regulation in the brain.
“I was diagnosed with it [bipolar disorder] around the end of middle school. I was really happy to know that what I was feeling was common, but I hate having to be drugged to be tolerable,” Foster said.
Psychosis is a broad term used to describe a serious mental illness with traits such as the loss of reality, social detachment, and the blatant distortion of one’s personality. Psychosis is most closely related with the chronic mental disorder, schizophrenia.
The psychology behind acts of violence against oneself is complex, but is intertwined nearly exactly with that of depression.
The general misconception about self-injury is that these cutters mutilate their bodies as a suicide attempt. The reality is precisely the opposite. In order to maintain life, one may find that inflicting harm on a part of his body vivifies his life. Cutters often find they have lost meaning to their life and almost as a test, they cut or burn their skin.  
As suicide and self-infliction are viewed as one in the same, when school administrators discover a student who cuts, they immediately assume the student it try to commit suicide. Over time, psychologists have published books containing the overt differences. A major distinction is the frequency. Suicidal attempts are often spread out and temporary; however, cutting episodes can take place as often as one, two or three times a week and can happen for years.
“One of my friends told our school social worker that I had cuts on my arms and now the teachers make checks to see if I have any news ones. It really made me mad because I trusted her and now they probably all think I‘m some sort of freak,” a male cutter said.
Another misconception is that all cutters hurt themselves to seek attention. The desperation behind what a self-injurer feels is not to be ignored; however, is should not be misconstrued either. The majority of cutters do not want anyone to see what they have done to themselves; therefore, the possibility of cutting simply for attention is low. An accessory popular in the 80s, has come back into fashion in an attempt to hide the scars. Arm bands with music groups or artists are worn to protect what the cutter doesn’t want people to see. Although this method has nearly defeated its purpose at this point in time, due to the fact that many people are now aware of this knowledge.
“It just makes everything worse when people assume. They don’t know anything about me or my problems. I feel the urge to keep everything from everyone when I hear that,” a female cutter said.
A handful of famous celebrities have a history of self-abuse. After being raped at the age of 12, singer Fiona Apple began to suffer from an eating disorder. She believed because she was raped when her body was growing in voluptuousness, she should not eat to maintain a body type that no one would want to “grab.” After she read the first bad review about her first album, Fiona started scratching her arms until they bled and she would sometimes bite her bottom to acquire the same result.
Actor Johnny Depp was an insecure teenager and often indulged in alcohol, drugs and tobacco. He had a small number of scars on his left arm where he had cut himself at various times earlier in his life. He considered his arm a journal of times he wanted to remember -- good and bad. Depp no longer drinks, does drugs or cuts himself, but still feels depressed at times.
Singer Shirley Mason of the band Garbage injured herself in her adolescence years because of her childhood. As a child, her schoolmates of joust at her and make fun of her facial features. Manson was even ridiculed by a teacher until she felt “less than human.” By her late teenage years, she was doing drugs and drinking constantly. She took razors and cut her arms whenever she felt overwhelmed by life. At one point, she even carried around a razor in case she needed to during school. The lyrics in Garbage‘s first album expressed what Manson felt as a teenager and her experiences with depression. Manson doesn’t cut anymore; however, she still hates the way she looks and forces herself to resist the urge to.
Diana, the Princess of Wales, discovered on the night before her wedding, that her fiancée was in love with someone else. During her marriage to Prince Charles, she would have many arguments with him and proceed to cut her wrists. During an argument, Diana cut her chest and thighs, but her husband believed it was just an attempt to get attention. Once, after a fight on a plane, she cut her arms and smeared the blood all over the walls.
Author Elizabeth Wurtzel began to cut her legs at the young age of 10. She stopped eating and started skipping school. When her parents tried to get help for her, the parents couldn’t agree on one psychiatrist and while her mother decided on the one she liked, he father secretly took her to see others. After years of dealing with ineffective assistance, Wurtzel found she was more depressed than when she started. Her depression climaxed when she attempted suicide in her psychiatrists bathroom and she was admitted into a ward for special help. As one of the first patients to test Prozac, an anti-depressant, she started to feel better about herself.
Help for self-mutilators is easy to assess. The usual way is to get medical attention and be diagnosed. The doctor can prescribe a medication such as Zoloft, Lexapro, or Wellbutrin. These medicines are created to treat anxiety and/or depression.
Getting a psychiatrist to talk to once a week is also a form of recovery. Although it can be rather expensive, psychiatric assistance has proved to be exceedingly helpful. This type of help is often overlooked because of the aura surrounding it. Many people believe psychiatrists to be “quacks.”
If money is an issue, a school social worker is the second best option. The last and easiest form of help is to simply talk to a friend or family member whom you trust. Although trust doesn’t always mean that person won’t tell anyone, it is an important trait in a confidante. It is well-known that a trustworthy person will do what is right in securing the safety of a loved one.
Interventions, such as SAFE (Self-Abuse Finally Ends), for self-injurers are easily found. If one doesn’t know where to look, a social worker would most likely know where.
Support groups are commonplace, as well. Whether you take time out of your schedule to attend one, or join a group on-line, such as Safe Haven or Bodies Under Siege, support groups are a positive and informal way to cope with self-injury.
Cutters don’t always understand what they are doing or sometimes the actual reason why. The need to cut to feel the pain is the basic reasoning behind it and sometimes that is all the self-injurer is aware of. Finding information about self-injury on the Internet or in a book could help if this is the only method the cutter feels safe trying. Understanding their personal problem to the fullest should be the goal.
"It's harder for kids to get noticed as individuals, and they don't have the words for it," says Wendy Lader, who is also clinical director of the SAFE Alternatives program at Linden Oaks at Edward Hospital in Naperville, Ill. "So they show it -- even if it's just to themselves because it makes it real for them. It's almost like their body becomes a bulletin board on which to notch their pain."

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Journalistic piece...YES it is supposed to be this dry. IT'S JOURNALISM!