Behind the pain

Self-harm is on the rise, and it is not just something that young people do.

- MARC WILSON

At the end of last year, my students and I surveyed about 4500 New Zealanders on topics such as mental health, emotional lives and fun stuff like politics and personality.

Over the next few weeks, I will write about some of the things our survey shows.

First, I'm going to talk about something I know a lot about. Self-injury. Since the early 2000s, there's been an increase in the incidence of self-injury and an explosion in research into it. Internationally, we're confident there's more of it than 20 years ago. As a result, research is even more important to inform how we support people who hurt themselves.

Research in this broad area often makes a distinction between non-suicidal self-injury, or NSSI, which involves deliberate harm to one's body but without the intent to die, and self-harm, which includes those things but also harm that may not be directly physical, and may also involve intent to die.

We've looked at both of these things, but I'm focusing on NSSI.