I started working with cutters more than a decade ago, so that means I was doing therapy with teens and adults who had little to no exposure to social media.
I know, I know—dinosaurs. Back then, if you wanted people to know your current dating status or what you had for lunch, you had to pick up something called a telephone, or spend some money on a billboard. And because most of us realized that no one really cared that much about you, and that there was nothing wrong with that, nobody really took the time to call their cousin and say, “Hey, Joe. I’ve been eating cheese. Have a good day!”
Now there’s Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, Blogster, FourSquare, Flickr, and probably three new ones since I started typing. I’ve stolen Conan O’Brien’s best joke EVER and now refer to them collectively as “YouTwitFace.”
You can’t find me on any of them—I think I’m the last holdout—but you can find all my clients on them. And over the years, I’ve noticed a change.
Because we all lived with much more privacy back then, my clients were engaging in a behavior that was almost unknown. I remember my mother’s incredulous reaction when I explained what I did for a living: “Oh, come on. People don’t really do that. Not on purpose.”
I frequently got invited to give talks to parent groups, schools, hospitals, even counseling centers, to help explain what this thing was and why people would do it. I was more of an educator on the behavior itself back then, and spent a great deal of time responding to balking audience members with, “Yes, really. On purpose.”
Little was known about the reasons for it, and even less was known about how to fix it. Most interestingly, it was misunderstood as an attention-getting behavior back then. I had to explain that on the contrary, the last thing these individuals wanted was attention. As counterintuitive as it may seem, they were actually trying to solve their problems in private, and would much prefer to go through their entire lives without anyone finding out.
Most of my work, and certainly this entire institute, has been dedicated to dealing with that kind of self-harm. The kind that’s secret, shameful, rage-based, and embarrassing for the self-harmer.
But with the advent of the interwebs, we’ve had to add a secondary form of treatment (still family therapy) for a “new” kind of self-harmer—the social media-obsessed attention-seekers.
Because teenagers are teenagers, they will forever struggle with the impossible task of striking a balance between conformity and nonconformity.
Remember adolescence? Remember when you had to put aching amounts of effort into what to wear because you didn’t want to look exactly like everyone else, but you definitely wanted to look pretty much like everyone else?
You had to be troubled enough for your pain to be utterly incomprehensible to others (especially adults), but not as troubled as the real outcasts, remember? Well, that never went away. And it’s never going to go away.
Actually, adolescence is a crucial stage of human development. We call it identity building.
Social media has complicated the playing field, no doubt. It’s funny—as much as I avoid social media for my own privacy, I’ve always been the one to stick up for technology. When parent groups or health organizations try to blame the internet for society’s problems, I’m usually the one defending it.
I’ll typically point to some Pew research (here’s my favorite) to illustrate that actually, social media users are not as isolated or depressed as one might think. In fact, people who are online or on their phones a lot have been known to be more open-minded, more likely to visit public places like parks and coffee shops, and have more members in their “core networks.”
You can’t blame all of our woes on the latest technological advance. However, I’ve about had it with social networking and self-harm. I’d like to invite some of these social media emperors to my office to show them what I’m seeing day after day, thanks to their sites.
That whole competing for Most Troubled Teen award I mentioned earlier? Good grief. The other day I overheard a teen counting how many cuts she could see in her friend’s Tumblr post, then swearing that she had at least two more on her arm. Worse, a terrified mother dragged her daughter into my office after discovering some cuts on her leg about a month ago. One look at the daughter and I could tell she wasn’t a rage-based cutter—when I asked about it, she said she felt bad and had read her friend’s tweets about how cutting helped sometimes. She thought she’d try it. Because she read it on Twitter.
Another one watched a how-to on YouTube. She then Instagrammed everyone she knew with her own graphic pic.
I never thought I’d say this, but it’s happening: They are actually trying to one-up each other by out-cutting the latest post. Unreal.
Here’s the problem: We are at an awkward time in history where self-harm is still pretty misunderstood, especially by parents and even by therapists, but teens are using YouTwitFace to post how troubled they are.
As a result, parents are now seeing the bloody damage in graphic detail. They freak out (understandably) and race their kids to treatment. That oh-so-elusive attention the teen was after is thus obtained.
And now we’re reading headlines about the “epidemic” of self-harm and how dramatically it’s grown. Because it’s the new black. Everybody’s doing it.
This is not the self-harm that I treat. This is something else. This is adolescence. This is peer pressure and the age-old battle between the individual and the group. I’ve had to change my tune over the years and come up with a different answer to the question about whether cutting is just attention-seeking behavior.
Because when you broadcast it on YouTwitFace, it is. Sorry.
And society is going to respond to you the way society should respond to you—with a little sympathy and a lot of disdain. That’s not how we get each other’s attention. Use your words.
On the bright side, I’ve been happy to keep up with Tumblr’s process of introducing a no-posting policy for anything that glamorizes self-harm, eating disorders, or suicide. I’m curious to see where they land.
It’s been most encouraging to see more sites following the advice of self-harm professionals. Lately it seem that most put some serious limitations on that kind of sharing, considering how triggering it can be for “real” (rage-based) cutters.
We’re grateful for the help, out here in the trenches.
-Angela Kahn is the Founder and Director of KISI