Q&A: Addressing self harm in college student population

The month of March is dedicated to awareness of self-harm, or non-suicidal selfinjury, a behavior that is particularly common among college students. To increase visibility for this issue, the Mercury sat downwith Dr. Regina Ybarra, a professor at UTD who has done research on self-injurious behavior among college students.

Q: Can you start by giving a definition of what self-harm is?

Self-harm is defined as any behavior that seeks to cause injury on the body...without suicidal intent. So, you can have all kinds of different self-harm behaviors. Most of the time people are most familiar with cutting. But you can have biting...there is sometimes rubbing things on the skin to scratch, so sometimes like glass or sandpaper and things like that. I mean, it can go all the way to breaking your own bones, punching yourself, more severe damage.

Q: Do you have any ideas as to why selfharm is so common in this age group?

So some of the research that I have done in the past, when we looked at self-harm, we were actually particularly interested in why people are doing it and specifically what's going on for people right before, during, and right after...people who self-harm multiple times, they tend to show some sort of change in their experience. And this might be feelings of relief to, I felt numb before, but I was feelingsomething. And for a lot of people, numbness can be kind of a disturbing thing. And so physical pain kind of breaks through that. Other people sometimes feel relief because they experience a lot of psychological pain and a lot of things that they don't have a lot of control over. And if I cause physical damage to myself, that's something I'm in control of. And it's something tangible... that's easier to deal with than the psychological pain that they might be feeling.

Q: What kind of treatments might you pursue with a client who self-harms?

You can't just address the self-harm, you have to address what's causing it. What's the pain? It might be loneliness, it might be depression, it might be anxiety, all kinds of different things it could be. So first of all, figur- ing out what is driving that.And secondly, it's really important to give people tools to know what to do...one of the things that we would do is we would also brainstorm different strategies. And I'd have my clients sometimes list five strategies are going to be their go-tos, in that order...And for most people who have been self-harming for a long time, self-harm is on that list. And it's hard to get them to agree right off the bat to say, oh no, I'm definitely not going to. So we would start with an agreement—you're going to try all these other things first, before you get to [self-harm].