Self-harm is not just attention-seeking: it’s time to talk openly about the issue

Tags

attention-seeking, Bullying, causes, emotional distress, emotional pain, emotions, isolation, obsessions, pain, physical pain, professional help, relief, secret, self-harm, stress, teenagers, young people

Self-harm is not just attention-seeking: it’s time to talk openly about the issue

Three years ago, with her parents and sisters out for dinner, then-13-year-old Lucy found herself alone in her family’s Lincolnshire home. Dressed in her pink Tinker Bell pyjamas, she began to make herself a cup of tea. Then she spotted an object on the kitchen counter that immediately diverted her attention. “Shall I do it?” Lucy asked herself. “Will it stop the pain?”

For Lucy, now 17, that evening marked the start of a two-and-a-half year struggle with self-harm. Two weeks before, she had been brutally attacked and raped (which she now describes as “the incident”). At the time, anxious they wouldn’t believe her, Lucy never fully revealed to anyone what had happened. In her mind, she tried to repress the rape. She began shutting herself in her bedroom. She told her parents she was feeling unwell. Physical pain, she decided, was the only way to purge her pent-up emotional pain.

“When you keep all your problems in, it feels like you’re screaming inside,” Lucy says. “But when you cut or burn yourself, the pain is more physical. You feel like you’re releasing that scream. After a few months, self-harming became part of my daily routine.”

Eventually, both at school or at home, Lucy was self-harming four times a day. She wore black jeans, black tops and even black gloves to conceal her scars. “I pushed everyone everyone away” Lucy says. “I stopped caring about school. My grades suffered. Self-harm became a real obsession. It took over my life.”

Today, having made a huge effort to stop, Lucy has not self-harmed for more than six months. But self-harm is still on the rise among the UK’s young population. Data published last year by a collaborate study from England Health Behaviour in School Aged Children (HBSC) revealed that up to one in five 15-year-olds across the country self-harm. During the past decade, according to the same study, there has been a three-fold increase in the total number of UK teenagers self-harming.

What drives young people to self-harm? Therapist Jenna Mutlick, who has a personal experience of it, says it is usually some form of “self-punishment”. People believe they have done something wrong – even when they haven’t – and then feel they deserve the pain. “I know a few people who self-harm because they are bullied and eventually come to believe that they then deserve to be bullied,” she says. “When you self-harm, it is so hard to escape from the [mental] space that you are in.”

“It’s a very heterogeneous group of people who self-harm, and there are a variety of reasons why people might start,” says Professor Glyn Lewis, head of psychiatry at University College London. “Clearly, there are people who self-harm because they want to take their own lives, but there are also people who want to self-harm because they are in difficult situations or want to relieve stress.

“As a long-term strategy, of course, self-harm is not very effective,” he adds, “but people do report that they get some form of relief from upsetting thoughts or emotions. Some forms of self-harm are obviously very dangerous, but there’s a continuum. Some people may only scratch themselves very superficially, for example, which won’t do any long-lasting damage.”

The causes of self-harm are likely to be complex, even if the person harming does not see the issues in that way. Kieran, from Glasgow, began self-harming after five years of “constant” physical and verbal bullying at school. His parents split up when he was seven, though he says it was the bullying – which still torments him today – that incited his self-harming. “The bullying made me feel really unbalanced,” says Kieran, now 23. “I started to self-harm when I was aged 11, and it kind of just snowballed from there. I stopped eating. I isolated myself from a lot of my friends and family. I kept it a secret for almost a decade.”

Like Lucy, Kieran says that self-harming became a secret obsession. The bullying made him feel “physically and mentally numb”. Self-harm, by contrast, made Kieran feel more alive, and he would regularly self-harm in his bedroom at night. “It brought me out of my slumber,” he says. “It made me feel normal, and I became addicted to doing it for that reason.” He says that the self-harm was like an “adrenaline shot” that brings everything back into focus.”

Kieran admits that he still has a “daily battle” with self-harm. He is significantly better than he was a few years ago, though, when he would harm himself up to 400 times in one evening. “It’s a high level of emotional distress that causes people to resort to self-harming,” he says. “People sometimes feel like they can’t cope with their emotion. It’s how they cope with life’s daily stresses.”

Chris Leaman, from the UK mental health charity YoungMinds, says it is still very much a taboo subject in British society. “Every year, we work with Childline, YouthNet and selfharmUK to try and combat these sort of stigmas for Self-Harm Awareness Day,” he says. “There is a definite problem around young men not feeling like they can talk about their issues, which can make self-harm quite a common issue among them.”

“Some people do talk about self-harm quite openly, but that’s relatively unusual,” says Professor Glyn Lewis. “A lot of people conceal self-harming behaviour from their friends and family. There are not necessarily signs to look out for; it’s more a case of often asking people how they are feeling, and keeping communication open with them. As a rule, families and friends concerned about someone self-harming always should talk to the person themselves and encourage them to seek professional help.”

Statistically, teenage girls are still more than twice as likely to self-harm than young males, and this has helped create another gender-based stigma: that self-harming girls are simply seeking attention. Fiona Brooks, professor of adolescent and child health at the University of Hertfordshire, who led the investigations for last year’s HBSC report, identifies this as a prevalent problem. “Nowadays, young people are in a much more uncertain world than before,” she says. “Instead of self-harming just being dismissed as attention seeking, it’s something that needs to be taken seriously. Equally, if young girls are self-harming for attention, that’s a different matter that needs to be taken just as seriously.”

Lucy thinks back on that evening she started self-harming, and wishes that she could tell herself to stop – and talk to someone. Talking, like with most former self-harmers, has been a significant part of Lucy’s recovery, but she also credits her own determination as a decisive factor. “If you don’t want to stop, you won’t,” she says. “In the end, a lot of it comes down to how you see yourself. I used to feel people were always judging me, but now I feel I don’t care what they think. Why should I let them control my happiness?”

More than half of bullied children become depressed as adults, survey shows

Tags

'character-building', Bullying, Children, Cyberbullying, Depression, rite of passage, self-harm, suicidal

More than half of bullied children become depressed as adults, survey shows

55 per cent of children who have been bullied develop depression – with more than one in three becoming suicidal or self-harming as a result, according to a Europe-wide poll released today.

Yet despite the scale of suffering, one in three adults view bullying as a routine rite of passage, and 16 per cent describe it as “character-building”.

The shocking statistics have provoked calls for urgent action, with more than 100,000 people joining a campaign by the BeatBullying charity calling on the European Commission to introduce new laws to protect children from bullying and cyberbullying.

This comes after an inquest in May heard how a British teenager walked into the sea to drown after suffering cyberbullying over Facebook.

Callum Moody-Chapman, 17, from Cumbria, had been sent online threats by a former friend who was going out with his ex-girlfriend. The 17-year-old boy threatened to beat him, set fire to his home and encourage friends “to stamp on your head”. A verdict of suicide into the youngster’s death last December was recorded by the coroner, who cited the abusive messages as “by far the most significant aspect of this case”.

Attitudes need to change if such tragedies are to be prevented, according to campaigners.

Emma-Jane Cross, chief executive of BeatBullying, said: “Far too many European citizens still see bullying as ‘part of growing up’ and don’t take it seriously. This is pushing young people to the brink with some even resorting to harming themselves in order to cope.”

She added: “How many more children have to tragically lose their lives before these outdated perceptions change? Today more than 100,000 children, families, schools and charitable organisations are sending the European Commission a clear message that enough is enough. We urge them to listen.”

And Sarah Crown, editor of Mumsnet, one of the organisations backing the protest, commented: “These figures demonstrate once again why bullying ought not to be treated as ‘part and parcel’ of growing up. It’s a serious matter that can result in severe consequences for the victim.”

Little Mix, Amanda Holden, JLS singer Aston Merrygold, and reality TV star Jamie Laing from Made in Chelsea are among the names supporting the campaign. Leigh Anne of Little Mix said: “Myself and the girls have all experienced being bullied at some point in our life, when we see on Twitter that some of our fans are going through it now we find it so upsetting, and that’s the reason we feel so passionate about this campaign.”

And the effects on victims can be long-lasting. For childhood bullying can continue to damage mental and physical health for decades afterwards, causing higher rates of depression, ill health and unemployment in adult life, according to a study by researchers from Kings College London published earlier this year.

Self-harm sites and cyberbullying: the threat to children from web’s dark side

Tags

Bullying, Depression, mental health issues, self-harm, social networks, suicide, teenagers, young people

Self-harm sites and cyberbullying: the threat to children from web’s dark side

“Some of the images do scare me, especially if it’s my friends. Once my friend cut lines down the side of his face as a ‘Chelsea Smile’, he put it online and it was the worst thing I had ever seen. He’s my friend, I don’t want to see him that upset. He got so much hate for it and ended up going into hibernation, nobody heard from him for over a week and we honestly thought he had killed himself.”

Frankie* is 15 and lives in the Midlands. For the past year or so she has updated her Tumblr blog most days. On other social networks she uses her real name, but on Tumblr – a blogging platform – she shares her darkest thoughts about depression, anxiety and self-harm anonymously. “The other day I put up a self-harm picture,” she says. “I was alone and in a dark place. […] Of course, nobody would help, but posting it boosted my confidence a little; finding it buried in amongst all the other self-harm posts reminded me I’m not alone.”

Fears about self-harm sites have been growing since the suicides of two teenagers who, it emerged, were obsessed with self-harm and depression blogs, with mental health campaigners and experts warning that the UK’s teens are at risk of becoming a lost generation if parents and adults cannot reach out to them across the digital divide.

Tallulah Wilson, a 15-year-old who killed herself in 2012, was caught up in a “toxic digital world”, according to her mother, while the parents of Sasha Steadman, a 16-year-old who died from a suspected drug overdose in January after looking at self-harm sites, said her “impressionable mind” had been filled “with their damning gospel of darkness”.

For the uninitiated, self-harm blogs present a surreal world of fantasy and pain. Countless sites dedicated to self-harm and depression are filled with images of bleeding wounds juxtaposed with pixelated gifs, flickering eerily with snippets of Hollywood angst. Helen, who is now 18, visited them regularly, before stopping to help herself move on from self-harming. “You have people asking you how to cut yourself deep enough because their therapist said it wasn’t bad enough,” she says. “I have had people tell me to kill myself. I think the most traumatic is when you find someone’s suicide note online and there is no way to actually get in contact with the person.”

Isolated and lonely, she used the blogs because they gave her a sense of belonging. “You want to find people who are similar to you. That is what humans do,” she says. “It starts off as trying to help, but then it becomes competitive and dangerous. You get sucked into this world of who can cut the deepest/be the skinniest and avoid notice by the outside world. You end up spending hours a day searching these sites for reassurance, but it just makes it harder.”

Keeping children safe online is the “child protection challenge of this generation”, according to Peter Wanless, head of the NSPCC. ChildLine, part of the organisation, registered an 87% rise in calls about cyberbullying last year, a 41% increase in calls about self-harm, and a 33% increase in calls about suicide, with the biggest increase among 12- to 15-year-olds.

While the internet provides unprecedented opportunities for young people to communicate and learn, it can be a dangerous place for vulnerable teenagers, says Sue Minto, the head of ChildLine. “Children are communicating in a way we have never seen before – all the time and instantly,” she says. “Personally, I think this kind of relentless exposure is the biggest challenge we have ever faced.”

Minto notes that while peer pressure and bullying have been around for a long time, the ability to be contacted at all times is new. The cloak of anonymity can lead children to make comments they would shy away from in “real” life, she says. “The pressure on children is immense and very worrying – there is no break for these young people, it is quite relentless. Children who are being bullied tell us there is no point in turning off their phone, because the messages will just be there waiting for them.”

A recent survey carried out by youth charities ChildLine, Selfharm.co.uk,YouthNet and YoungMinds revealed that 61% of the 4,000 young people who responded said they self harmed because they felt alone, while 25% cited bullying. Almost 40% said they had never spoken to anyone in the “real world” about it.

Rachel Welch, director of Selfharm.co.uk, which supports young people affected by self-harm, says there is a huge gap between what adults see of the online world and their children’s experience. “So many young people are drifting into a world where they are completely disconnected,” she says.

But how dangerous are self-harm sites? Do they simply show teenage angst and creative expression, or highlight a worrying deterioration of teenage mental health?

Mary Hassell, the coroner presiding over the inquest of Tallulah Wilson, was concerned enough to write to Jeremy Hunt, the health secretary, to warn him of a risk of future deaths without a greater understanding of children’s online worlds. Although Tallulah was treated by healthcare professionals, they didn’t have “a good enough understanding of the evolving way that the internet is used by young people, most particularly in terms of the online life that is quite separate from the rest of life”, she wrote.

A study into possible links between suicide and the internet has just been commissioned by the Department of Health and will report in two and a half years: a department spokeswoman said children’s mental health was a priority for the government and pointed to the introduction of “family-friendly filters” and internet safety into the national curriculum.

But for Sarah Brennan, chief executive of the youth mental health charity Young Minds, the real issue is ignorance of the scale of the problem, or even denial that the problem exists. The current NHS commissioning of youth mental health services is based on data collected in 2004 – the year Facebook launched.

“It is shocking that the government is allowing NHS commissioners to plan services based on out of date and inaccurate data,” Brennan says, adding that a Young Minds freedom of information request recently revealed that 34 out of 51 local authorities in England have reduced the budget for their children and adolescent mental health services since 2010, while a Community Care/BBC investigation this week showed that a growing number of seriously ill children are being admitted to adult psychiatric wards or sent hundreds of miles from home for hospital care.

“We are sitting on a ticking time bomb here,” says Brennan. “At the same time that we are seeing an increase in need, youth mental health services are being cut. There is an explosion of bullying online and young people struggling to cope with mental health issues, anxiety, eating disorders. If we don’t do something about it we could have a lost generation.”

What can be done? Since Tallulah Wilson’s suicide, Tumblr has introduced a warning that pops up when users search for terms related to self-harm, directing them towards sites offering support and calling on users to report blogs with “inappropriate content” so they can be taken down. A Tumblr spokeswoman said the site was “deeply committed to protecting our users’ freedom of expression”, but that it draws lines “around a few categories of content we consider damaging to our community, including blogs that encourage self-harm”.

And while there have been calls to shut down certain sites, such as Ask.fm – which allows users to ask anonymous questions and has been linked to teen suicides – teenagers and professionals spoken to by the Guardian agreed that simply banning sites or “dangerous” search terms was futile. Regulation can also backfire – recent efforts to impose opt-out “objectionable content filters”, backed by the prime minister, have resulted in sites such as ChildLine and Refuge also being blocked.

“We cannot put our head in the sand, simply blame these sites or hope to regulate our way out of this,” says Minto. “We are playing catch-up, but we need to take responsibility. You wouldn’t let your child cross the road without talking to them about road safety and the same goes for the risks of the internet – if we don’t tackle this it’s like opening the door and letting them walk through this cyberworld completely unequipped.”

Welch at Selfharm.co.uk agrees: “Calling for any type of ban is just missing the point. What we have to do is make sure our young people are emotionally resilient, emotionally aware and they know where to go to get help if they need it.”

Others say that while parts of the internet can be dangerous for vulnerable children, it can also provide the means to keep others safe and let them talk about their problems. As many young people contact ChildLine online as call its helpline. Online friends can be a force for good.

Samantha, a 17-year-old who started self-harming when she was 14, says her Tumblr site helped her recover from depression. “I felt like I belonged somewhere, they understood me in a way I felt I had never been understood before,” she says. At one point, she was off school with depression and spent all day online, answering 10-15 messages from other troubled teenagers every day. Now she “has a life” again and is online less frequently. “I’ve been told that I’ve saved lives and it made me feel good about myself that I was helping other people,” she says. “It’s really odd – but it works for me.”

Frankie, who is still working towards recovery, has mixed emotions. While she recognises that some blogs might encourage self-harmers, or make them feel worse, she still believes they can help. “I think for [people] like myself it can be reassuring just to know there are others out there that do it too [but] what scares me is thinking how many there are, how they are all posting it online, are they all cries for help? If that many people are crying for help then something needs to be done, and fast.”

*Names of young people have been changed. If you face any of the issues in this piece, you can call ChildLine on 0800 1111

Paedophiles blackmail thousands of UK teens into online sex acts

Tags

images, self-harm, social networks, suicide

Paedophiles blackmail thousands of UK teens into online sex acts

Thousands of British children have been targeted by internet blackmailers, with many forced to use webcams to film themselves performing sex acts or self-mutilation because they fear having their naked pictures sent to their families, child protection experts warn today.

The blackmailing of children has emerged as a fast-growing new method employed by sadistic abusers who operate behind fake profiles on social networks to take advantage of youthful sexual experimentation and snare their victims, driving some to self-harm and even suicide.

A single police operation discovered that one small ring of paedophiles overseas had pressured more than 300 children, including 96 in Britain, into performing live sex acts online. Some of the youngsters attempted suicide when they were threatened with having their behaviour made public, according to the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (Ceop). Police analysis of computers reveals that, before befriending a child they intend to groom for online abuse, perpetrators often research the victim’s location, school and other details, so as to present a convincing picture of themselves as a local young adolescent. Children as young as eight are being targeted, according to Ceop.

Such grooming often starts on open chat forums before moving to private areas where the talk swiftly becomes more explicit. The threats usually start after children have been tricked into posting compromising pictures of themselves that they fear could be distributed more widely. In one online conversation retrieved by the authorities, an abuser tricked his victim and then became increasingly aggressive, saying he did not care if the boy killed himself. “I totally own you,” he said.

The practice appears to be a new,  more menacing development in the world of cyber-bullying. Children have been forced to film themselves on  webcams as they write degrading statements on their bodies or cut themselves, says Ceop. One abuser collected images of his blackmailed victims in a folder named “slaves”.

A British teenager is one of seven young people who have killed themselves over blackmail. Daniel Perry, 17, of Dunfermline, Fife, leapt from the Forth Road Bridge in July. He had been having online chats with a person he believed to be an American girl of his own age, but was then told his conversations would be played to his family and friends unless he paid money into a bank account. Police are still investigating Daniel’s death.

Experts said that, while they had seen a few cases of extortion, most blackmailers were motivated by sexual desire and sadism. “There is a desire for power and control, and getting a kick out of causing as much pain as possible,” said Dr Elly Farmer, a clinical psychologist.

Ceop has carried out 12 operations over the past two years in which the blackmailing of children into performing sex acts was a clear motive, with 424 victims worldwide and 184 in Britain. Five of those operations – against groups and individuals – were in the UK. Ceop said the number of victims identified represented a small fraction of the number targeted.

The global nature of the problem was highlighted by “Operation K”, launched this year after a complaint by one victim to police in Britain. It revealed evidence of a group of friends in an unspecified country acting together to ensnare young children. They operated dozens of profiles and email addresses on five websites. Most of the British children targeted were boys aged 11 to 15. Britons were disproportionately targeted because they spoke English, and in the apparent belief that liberal values in this country were likely to make them more susceptible to online grooming, Ceop said. Many of the victims were forced to conduct graphic sex acts. “The coverage was immense,” said Ceop’s operations manager Stephanie McCourt. “It was very easy for children to get caught up in that process.”

A group of men, aged 20 to 44, are due to go on trial within the next month in an unspecified non-European country that authorities declined to name for legal reasons.

Ceop said a third of its operations had seen abusers operate on the so-called “Darknet” – an encrypted sub-layer of the world wide web that is supposed to ensure anonymity – but officials said people were arrested in every “sting”. They declined to say how suspects were identified.

“Young people must remember that the online world is the real world. Pictures can be distributed to thousands of people in seconds and can never be fully deleted,” said John Cameron, the head of the NSPCC helpline. “We need to educate young people but also reassure them that no matter what threats people make to them over the internet, they can be stopped and the crime they are committing is very serious and can result in a lengthy jail sentence.”

Last year, two brothers in Kuwait were jailed for five years after targeting 110 children around the world using similar tactics, with the majority from Britain. Mohammed Khalaf Al Ali Alhamadi, 35, and 27-year-old Yousef Al Ali Alhamadi were found to have blackmailed children from a dozen countries. They often pretended to be someone the victim already knew on social networks, then tricked them into handing over online passwords. Andy Baker, the deputy chief executive of Ceop, said: “These offenders are cowards. They hide behind a screen and, in many cases, make hollow threats which they know they will never act on because sharing these images will only bring the police closer to them.”

Contact the NSPCC’s dedicated helpline on 0800 328 0904

Case studies

‘Blackmail drove me to self-harm’

“I was about 12 and this person started talking to me on the internet and said he was around my age, and then the conversation sort of developed into other things.

“He’d steer the conversation in a way where it was turning a bit dirty, then he’d start asking for other types of pictures as well. If you try and say ‘oh I don’t want to talk about that’ or ‘whatever’, he’d threaten or blackmail me, saying that he’d send my dad all the chat logs if I didn’t do what he said. I just thought you wouldn’t blackmail someone you’re supposed to be in love with so I just told him to shut up and sent him a couple more photos but he started to do that every week.

“My teacher said I’d been acting depressed and they sorted me out with counselling. I’d started to self-harm as well because everything  just came together at the same time, and I was really upset and just needed a release.

“Luckily I’m a fairly strong person and I can get over things – I’ve learned to just push them away. But what if it was someone who wasn’t, who was a weaker-minded person than me, what would have happened? They might have committed suicide or something, and it wouldn’t have even been their fault – it would be because people weren’t there for them.”

Source: CEOP

‘He thought he let everyone down’

Daniel Perry, 17, a trainee mechanic, thought he was having conversations with a girl about his own age over the internet. Then in July he received a message saying that unless he paid up, explicit material from the conversations would be posted to his family.

An hour later Daniel, who was from Dunfermline, killed himself by jumping off the Forth Road Bridge.

“Knowing him as I do, he has felt embarrassed, horrified and has thought he’s let everybody down,” his mother told her local newspaper.

“He wasn’t doing anything wrong, just what anyone his age might do. This scam is all about exploiting young people.”

Blackmail chat: Extracts from intercepted conversations

I recorded everything. 8 minutes. Your mine

I am sending it to your friends

Why???

Please I’m begging you

What will you do for your social life? Are you willing to do anything?

Please delete it.

I’ll kill myself

I don’t care if u gonna killur self or whatever u gonna do

I totally own you

Staying safe: Advice for children

The Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP) gives the following tips for young people to stay safe online.

1. Don’t feel pressured to get naked on webcam. Abusers don’t always share images, even if they have threatened to. The more information they share, the more likely they are to be arrested.

2. If you are threatened online, tell a trusted adult at the earliest possible opportunity. There are alternatives to parents, including the NSPCC and Ceop.

3. It’s never too late to get help. Even if an abuser does share an image, that is better than being forced to do more sexual acts.

4. It’s not your fault – the abuser is the only person to blame. You won’t get in trouble. The abuser has broken the law by encouraging a young person to strip naked and is liable for prosecution.

CEOP also draws attention to some of the lies abusers use. For example: “The police will never find me. I’ve hidden myself on the internet.” In fact, this is never true: all abusers leave a “digital footprint” online. Another common lie is: “I’m definitely going to share this image if you don’t go on webcam for me.” In fact, abusers don’t always share images, even when they’ve threatened to. It’s not in their best interests: the more information they share, the easier it is for police to track them down.

For more information see: http://www.ceop.police.uk

Students stay silent about mental health problems, survey shows

Tags

anxiety, counselling, help, mental health issues, self-harm, stress, students, support, treatment, university

Students stay silent about mental health problems, survey shows

Universities should do more to encourage students with mental health problems to seek help, a leading charity has warned.

More than a quarter (26%) of students who say they experience mental health problems do not get treatment and only one in 10 use counselling services provided by their university, according to a National Union of Students (NUS) study.

Of the students surveyed by the union, one in five say they experienced mental health problems while at university. This is in line with national statistics estimating that in any one year 23% of British adults experience a mental disorder.

Those who do experience mental health problems cite coursework deadlines (65%) and exams (54%) as triggers of distress. Financial difficulties (47%), pressures about “fitting in” (27%) and homesickness (22%) also contribute to mental ill health.

Stress is one of the most common symptoms of distress (80%), with many students also reporting a lack of energy or motivation (70%), anxiety (55%) and insomnia (50%). Some 38% experience panic, while 14% consider self-harm and 13% report suicidal thoughts.

NUS researchers admit that their survey was self-selecting and may exaggerate the prevalence of mental health problems among students. But Hannah Paterson, NUS Disabled Students’ Officer, says the “primary concern” is that very few of the students experiencing distress speak about their problem.

Of those who do experience mental health problems, 64% do not use any formal services for advice and support.

Students are more likely to tell their friends and family about feelings of anxiety, than they are to approach a doctor, academic or university counsellor.

Paul Farmer, chief executive of Mind, says this may be because of the stigma attached to mental illnesses. He adds that universities should do more to reach out to students.

“Higher education institutions need to ensure not just that services are in place to support mental wellbeing, but that they proactively create a culture of openness where students feel able to talk about their mental health and are aware of the support that’s available.

“Opening up to friends and family can help those feeling stressed or anxious, but anyone experiencing suicidal thoughts or consistently feeling down may have an enduring mental health problem, so it’s best they visit their GP. Nobody should suffer alone.”

Poppy Jaman, chief executive of Mental Health First Aid England says the NUS’ findings are unsurprising: “The student community is considered high risk for mental ill health, with exams, intense studying and living away from home for the first time all contributing factors.

“Where symptoms of poor mental health are spotted early and appropriate support and treatment is put in place the subsequent rate of recovery is significantly improved. Much more needs to be done within educational settings to improve the prevention and intervention of mental ill health.”

We must identify girls at risk from gangs

Tags

gangs, isolation, risk, self-harm, sexual abuse, sexual exploitation, vulnerability

We must identify girls at risk from gangs

When I met Rita she was 17 and in custody for the 13th time. Her offending had escalated from moped theft and “antisocial” behaviour with boys when she was 11, through to firearms possession. She had been self-harming for the past three years, had contracted chlamydia, was malnourished, had developed an addiction to crack cocaine, and was being sexually exploited by the street gang to whom she was associated.

This had not happened to Rita overnight. It was the consequence of years of exploitation by her male peers, isolation from her friends, exclusion from school, and being sexually abused by a family member when she was eight years old. From a young age, a myriad of professionals had opportunities to intervene and protect Rita, but, instead, her risk snowballed.

A report published this week by the Centre for Mental Health demonstrates that Rita’s case is not a one-off. The report is based on data from 8,000 10- to 18-year-olds, who, following their arrest between August 2011 and November 2012, were screened for 29 different risk factors and health issues, such as family conflict, homelessness and victimisation, as part of a study to identify the most appropriate interventions. The screening process was a pilot run in 37 areas of England. Gang-involved girls were found to be over nine times more likely to exhibit 19 or more of these risk factors than the other young people screened.

Gang-involved girls navigate harmful environments and relationships. According to the study, young women who had “histories of parental imprisonment, poor parental mental health, parental substance misuse, or neglect” were three to five times more likely to be gang-involved than other girls who were screened. In addition, they were three times more likely to be identified as victims of sexual abuse and four times more likely to have been excluded from school.

The same girls were also more likely to have difficulties with their physical and mental health and wellbeing than other young people screened. Like Rita, 30% were reported to be self-harming or at risk of suicide, and were over three times more likely to have sexual health needs.

When public attention is focused on the horrendous accounts of groups of adult men sexually exploiting girls around the country, it is easy to forget about girls and young women who are at risk from their peers. The information provided clearly demonstrates that risk can be present in homes, peer groups, schools, neighbourhoods and in wider society, which increases the vulnerability of girls to street gangs. This report provides a statistical backdrop to the accounts given to me by hundreds of women and girls during the Female Voice in Violence project; now it is time to turn the stories and figures into action.

From preventing vulnerability, to the identification of girls linked to gangs, through to the programmes delivered to support them, and routes of safety that are offered, our processes need to be gender-specific. This groundbreaking report throws into sharp relief the impact of gang-association and the opportunities that exist to intervene across a young woman’s lifetime. Of the girls that were screened, 73% engaged with an intervention that was offered to them. It is critical that all agencies who work with girls and young women use the evidence to mobilise and evaluate interventions that will better identify and protect those involved with gangs.

Cyber bullying: ‘He told me he was a footballer. I wasn’t to know I was a victim

Tags

Bullying, Children, Cyberbullying, Depression, mental health issues, risks, self-harm, sexual bullying, social networks, suicidal, young people

Cyber bullying: ‘He told me he was a footballer. I wasn’t to know I was a victim

When 15-year-old schoolgirl Lain Lerouge was contacted through Facebook by a professional footballer, she was not star-struck in the least. The player, who starred for a Football League club, was already friends on the social networking website with mutual acquaintances and she assumed that was how he came to first contact her. After their initial internet meeting, she and the 19-year-old player developed a closer relationship, chatting every day via their accounts and even talking regularly on the phone.

Lain, from Birmingham, said: “We just had normal, friendly chats. He would ask: what are you studying? Where are you from?”

Even when her online friend declared his love for her and asked her to send naked pictures of herself, she had no reason to doubt his identity. “I refused but then we’d talk on the phone. There was no question that it was a guy from London. His Facebook was flooded with girls, but I just thought he’s a footballer that’s totally normal. I know that I never met him and didn’t really know him, but if you chat to someone a lot you sort of feel like you know them. He seemed so normal,” she said.

The suspicion that she had been deceived came only when she received his telephone call and the number came up with Birmingham dialling code rather than a London one. This rang immediate alarm bells, and after some detective work Lain eventually traced the Facebook account to an older girl who went to the same school as she did.

It quickly emerged the student, who was in the year above, had set up a fake profile with pictures she had secretly downloaded from the account of a very real professional player. For her part, Lain said she simply felt embarrassed when she discovered she had been duped. “I never did get to the bottom of what motivated the hoax, but I was just so thankful that it wasn’t an old man.”

Lain’s bizarre experience is by no means an isolated case. Campaigners warn that growing numbers of children and teenagers are being bullied or even lured into sexual exchanges through bogus online profiles. Some young people are becoming depressed, even suicidal after falling victim, according to a survey by the charity Beatbullying.

Richard Piggin, deputy chief executive of Beatbullying, said: “Young people have told us about this alarming trend of fake profiles being used on social networking platforms to cyber bully and to engage in sexual bullying. The psychological impact of this form of bullying can be hugely distressing for many young people, with tragic and terrible consequences.” In a survey carried out by the anti-bullying charity, it discovered that nearly one-third of the 500 young people questioned say they have had a fake profile made about them on a social networking site. A further 65 per cent said they knew someone else who had been impersonated through a phoney account.

Beatbullying said the poll also showed that high numbers of the under-18s questioned had developed serious mental health issues after being targeted. Nearly one in 10 said they became depressed; 4 per cent developed an eating disorder; 7 per cent had suicidal feelings and the same number self-harmed. Another 13 per cent reported feeling afraid.

The extent of fake profiles on Facebook was revealed in the firm’s own financial records last August, which showed the site had 83 million fake profiles. But a Facebook spokesman stressed that the majority of these accounts had no malicious intent and were pages set up for businesses, pets or small children. He added that unlike with many other social networking sites, fake profiles can be reported directly to Facebook, which will then remove them. The spokesman stressed that the company acted swiftly on such reports. “Everyone on Facebook has access to simple tools to block and report people who make them uncomfortable.”

Mr Piggin added: “What social networking sites like Facebook need to do is work with organisations like us. They’re experts in technology, but they’re not experts in bullying and sexual bullying.”

Tony Neate, chief executive of the partly government-funded Get Safe Online, said: “Social networks are a great place for young people to talk to their friends, share photographs and play games – but children and parents must be educated on the risks that are around.”

Facebook Is The Worst Social Networking Site For Bullying, New Report Says

Tags

abuse, Bebo, Blackberry Messenger, Bullying, Cyberbullying, Depression, Facebook, harassment, internet, self-harm, social networking sites, Teens, trolling, Whatsapp, young people

Facebook Is The Worst Social Networking Site For Bullying, New Report Says

Facebook is the worst social networking site for internet trolling, and bullying is now more prevalent online than anywhere else, a study has suggested.

Some 87% of teenagers who reported cyber abuse said they were targeted on Mark Zuckerberg’s site, while around one-fifth of youngsters were picked on by Twitter trolls, the report showed.

Those most frequently victimised were 19-year-old boys.

According to the report, 49% of those targeted by bullies were victimised off-line, while 65% of teenagers were subjected to abuse in cyberspace.

Only 37% of those who had experienced trolling ever reported it to the social network where it took place, the report found.

Emma-Jane Cross, CEO and founder of the charity BeatBullying, said many young people were suffering in silence.

“Bullying both on and off-line continues to be a serious problem for a huge number of teenagers and we cannot ignore its often devastating and tragic effects,” she said.

“We work with hundreds of young people being cyber-bullied or trolled so badly that it can lead to depression, truancy, self-harm, or even force them to contemplate or attempt suicide.”

The study, for internet site knowthenet.org.uk, found a number of social networking sites had become “popular forums” for trolls.

Some 13% of the 13 to 19-year-olds consulted claimed they were targeted on BlackBerry Messenger, 8% said they were picked on by trolls on Bebo and 4% said they were victimised on Whatsapp.

Fewer than one in five (17%) teens said their first reaction would be to tell a parent and only 1% of those surveyed said their initial response would be to inform a teacher.

Around 34% of those who were picked on by trolls said their experiences lasted more than a month.

Knowthenet, which released the study, has now launched a “trolling hub” offering advice on how to deal with online bullying.

Opinium Research consulted more than 2,000 teenagers for the study.

A Facebook spokesman said: “There is no place for harassment on Facebook, but unfortunately a small minority of malicious individuals exist online, just as they do offline.

“We have a real name policy and provide people with simple tools to block people or report content which they find threatening so that we can remove it quickly.”

Links to report concerning behaviour on Facebook exist on every page of the site meaning users can report any piece of content.

Social workers need training to help them better understand self-harm

Tags

autism, awareness, education, family, online support, physical health, self-harm, social workers, support, training, understanding, young people

Social workers need training to help them better understand self-harm

It is estimated that one in 12 young people have self-harmed at some point in their lives, according to charity YouthNet. The charity says 3,000 people aged 16 to 25 visit its digital support service TheSite.org every month after looking up self-harm on a search engine. Yet, despite these statistics, self-harm awareness training for social workers is not always as comprehensive as it could be.

Nushra Mansuri, professional officer (England), at the British Association of Social Workers (BASW), says while some social workers – such as those working in mental health – may be sensitive to the issue of self-harm, there needs to be more awareness of the problem within the profession and that self-harm training is patchy.

“Whatever client group you work with, it will be a feature – it [self-harm training] should be integral because you are working with people whose lives are in crisis – there is a high correlation between the people you work with and people with a propensity to hurt themselves,” she says.

“Social workers need a greater awareness of the issue and need to understand why people self-harm. I wouldn’t lump everyone together, but it can be the impact of trauma, it can be a cry for help, it gives someone, who may have had control taken away from them, a sense of control.”

What mistakes could a social worker who lacks awareness of the issue of self-harm make? “An untrained person may have a tendency to look at the superficial and not go beyond that,” Mansuri says. “A social worker may be out of their comfort zone and not be able to deal with it – dealing with someone’s raw pain is really hard.”

Mansuri adds that social work “doesn’t have all the answers” when it comes to self-harm and that more education is required. “There is an underestimation of the importance of looking at self-harm,” she says.

Jennifer McLeod, managing director of self-harm training provider Step Up! International, says in some regions self-harm training for social workers is inadequate.

“Social workers ought to be trained in spotting the signs; if they aren’t spotted, it could be fatal,” she says. “It’s about listening to what’s not being said, looking for physical signs and emotions – they [people who self harm] are generally hiding something.”

McLeod adds that well-trained social workers will broach the topic with the young people and their families. “There might be denial from parents and social workers will have to find ways of eliciting information from young people.”

McLeod says delegates at Step Up! International training courses are often in a state of panic about the issue as they are uncertain about how to deal with the problem or even broach the subject.

“Some professionals don’t feel confident about bringing up the issue directly, they daren’t ask about it as they think it might make it worse”, she says.

McLeod suspects self-harm is on the increase – and is being talked about more – because of the current economic climate.

“In addition to the emotional and biological changes [young people experience], there is the recession, labour market issues, parents being made redundant – parents may not be managing and may be economically struggling,” she says.

Caroline Hattersley, head of information, advice and advocacy at theNational Autistic Society (NAS), says people with autism face a “raft of challenges” that might make self-harm more likely.

“Autism does bring specific difficulties – we’d like to see more training on understanding autism and its relation to self harm,” she says. “The key is understanding the individual and understanding the underlying causes.” Lacking this understanding could lead to a social worker misinterpreting why someone is self-harming, Hattersley adds.

“The individual might not have done it before, they may be hitting their head because they may have communication difficulties and they’re trying to communicate a physical problem – you might miss an ear infection,” she says.

Hattersley acknowledges that it can be difficult for professionals to admit they are struggling with the issue of self-harm. NAS has set up Network Autism, a forum where professionals can read research, and discuss with each other, the issue of self-harm and how it relates to people with autism.

YouthNet’s chief executive Emma Thomas says all practitioners working with people who self-harm would benefit from a better understanding of the problem. She adds: “If social workers are more aware of services like TheSite.org, many more young people can be directed to safe, anonymous online support to complement the vital offline support they need.”

US military struggling to stop suicide epidemic among war veterans

Tags

'moral injury', guilt, Military, PTSD, self-harm, shame, suicide

US military struggling to stop suicide epidemic among war veterans

Libby Busbee is pretty sure that her son William never sat through or read Shakespeare’s Macbeth, even though he behaved as though he had. Soon after he got back from his final tour of Afghanistan, he began rubbing his hands over and over and constantly rinsing them under the tap.

“Mom, it won’t wash off,” he said.

“What are you talking about?” she replied.

“The blood. It won’t come off.”

On 20 March last year, the soldier’s striving for self-cleanliness came to a sudden end. That night he locked himself in his car and, with his mother and two sisters screaming just a few feet away and with Swat officers encircling the vehicle, he shot himself in the head.

At the age of 23, William Busbee had joined a gruesome statistic. In 2012, for the first time in at least a generation, the number of active-duty soldiers who killed themselves, 177, exceeded the 176 who were killed while in the war zone. To put that another way, more of America’s serving soldiers died at their own hands than in pursuit of the enemy.

Credit: Guardian graphics

Across all branches of the US military and the reserves, a similar disturbing trend was recorded. In all, 349 service members took their own lives in 2012, while a lesser number, 295, died in combat.

Shocking though those figures are, they are as nothing compared with the statistic to which Busbee technically belongs. He had retired himself from the army just two months before he died, and so is officially recorded at death as a veteran – one of an astonishing 6,500 former military personnel who killed themselves in 2012, roughly equivalent to one every 80 minutes.

‘He wanted to be somebody, and he loved the army’

Busbee’s story, as told to the Guardian by his mother, illuminates crucial aspects of an epidemic that appears to be taking hold in the US military, spreading alarm as it grows. He personifies the despair that is being felt by increasing numbers of active and retired service members, as well as the inability of the military hierarchy to deal with their anguish.

That’s not, though, how William Busbee’s story began. He was in many ways the archetype of the American soldier. From the age of six he had only one ambition: to sign up for the military, which he did when he was 17.

“He wasn’t the normal teenager who went out and partied,” Libby Busbee said. “He wanted to be somebody. He had his mind set on what he wanted to do, and he loved the army. I couldn’t be more proud of him.”

Once enlisted, he was sent on three separate year-long tours to Afghanistan. It was the fulfillment of his dreams, but it came at a high price. He came under attack several times, and in one particularly serious incident incurred a blow to the head that caused traumatic brain injury. His body was so peppered with shrapnel that whenever he walked through an airport security screen he would set off the alarm.

The mental costs were high too. Each time he came back from Afghanistan. between tours or on R&R, he struck his mother as a little more on edge, a little more withdrawn. He would rarely go out of the house and seemed ill at ease among civilians. “I reckon he felt he no longer belonged here,” she said.

Once, Busbee was driving Libby in his car when a nearby train sounded its horn. He was so startled by the noise that he leapt out of the vehicle, leaving it to crash into the curb. After that, he never drove farther than a couple of blocks.

Nights were the worst. He had bad dreams and confessed to being scared of the dark, making Libby swear not to tell anybody. Then he took to sleeping in a closet, using a military sleeping bag tucked inside the tiny space to recreate the conditions of deployment. “I think it made him feel more comfortable,” his mother said.

After one especially fraught night, Libby awoke to find that he had slashed his face with a knife. Occasionally, he would allude to the distressing events that led to such extreme behaviour: there was the time that another soldier, aged 18, had been killed right beside him; and the times that he himself had killed.

William told his mother: “You would hate me if you knew what I’ve done out there.”

“I will never hate you. You are the same person you always were,” she said.

“No, Mom,” he countered. “The son you loved died over there.”

Soldiers’ psychological damage

For William Nash, a retired Navy psychiatrist who directed the marine corps’ combat stress control programme, William Busbee’s expressions of torment are all too familiar. He has worked with hundreds of service members who have been grappling with suicidal thoughts, not least when he was posted to Fallujah in Iraq during the height of the fighting in 2004.

He and colleagues in military psychiatry have developed the concept of “moral injury” to help understand the current wave of self-harm. He defines that as “damage to your deeply held beliefs about right and wrong. It might be caused by something that you do or fail to do, or by something that is done to you – but either way it breaks that sense of moral certainty.”

Contrary to widely held assumptions, it is not the fear and the terror that service members endure in the battlefield that inflicts most psychological damage, Nash has concluded, but feelings of shame and guilt related to the moral injuries they suffer. Top of the list of such injuries, by a long shot, is when one of their own people is killed.

“I have heard it over and over again from marines – the most common source of anguish for them was failing to protect their ‘brothers’. The significance of that is unfathomable, it’s comparable to the feelings I’ve heard from parents who have lost a child.”

Incidents of “friendly fire” when US personnel are killed by mistake by their own side is another cause of terrible hurt, as is the guilt that follows the knowledge that a military action has led to the deaths of civilians, particularly women and children. Another important factor, Nash stressed, was the impact of being discharged from the military that can also instil a devastating sense of loss in those who have led a hermetically sealed life within the armed forces and suddenly find themselves excluded from it.

That was certainly the case with William Busbee. In 2011, following his return to Fort Carson in Colorado after his third and last tour of Afghanistan, he made an unsuccessful attempt to kill himself. He was taken off normal duties and prescribed large quantities of psychotropic drugs which his mother believes only made his condition worse.

Eventually he was presented with an ultimatum by the army: retire yourself out or we will discharge you on medical grounds. He felt he had no choice but to quit, as to be medically discharged would have severely dented his future job prospects.

When he came home on 18 January 2012, a civilian once again, he was inconsolable. He told his mother: “I’m nothing now. I’ve been thrown away by the army.”

The suffering William Busbee went through, both inside the military and immediately after he left it, illustrates the most alarming single factor in the current suicide crisis: the growing link between multiple deployments and self-harm. Until 2012, the majority of individuals who killed themselves had seen no deployment at all. Their problems tended to relate to marital or relationship breakdown or financial or legal worries back at base.

The most recent department of defense suicide report, or DODSER, covers 2011 . It shows that less than half, 47%, of all suicides involved service members who had ever been in Iraq or Afghanistan. Just one in 10 of those who died did so while posted in the war zone. Only 15% had ever experienced direct combat.

The DODSER for 2012 has yet to be released, but when it is it is expected to record a sea change. For the first time, the majority of the those who killed themselves had been deployed. That’s a watershed that is causing deep concern within the services.

“We are starting to see the creeping up of suicides among those who have had multiple deployments,” said Phillip Carter, a military expert at the defence thinktank Center for a New American Security that in 2011 published one of the most authoritative studies into the crisis . He added that though the causes of the increase were still barely understood, one important cause might be the cumulative impact of deployments – the idea that the harmful consequences of stress might build up from one tour of Afghanistan to the next.

Over the past four years the Pentagon, and the US Department of Veterans Affairs, have invested considerable resources at tackling the problem. The US Department of Defense has launched a suicide prevention programme that tries to help service members to overcome the stigma towards seeking help. It has also launched an education campaign encouraging personnel to be on the look out for signs of distress among their peers under the rubric “never let our buddy fight alone”.

Despite such efforts, there is no apparent let up in the scale of the tragedy. Though President Obama has announced a draw-down of US troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2014, experts warn that the crisis could last for at least a decade beyond the end of war as a result of the delayed impact of psychological damage.

It’s all come in any case too late for Libby Busbee. She feels that her son was let down by the army he loved so much. In her view he was pumped full of drugs but deprived of the attention and care he needed.

William himself was so disillusioned that shortly before he died he told her that he didn’t want a military funeral; he would prefer to be cremated and his ashes scattered at sea. “I don’t want to be buried in my uniform – why would I want that when they threw me away when I was alive,” he said.

In the end, two infantrymen did stand to attention over his coffin, the flag was folded over it, and there was a gun salute as it was lowered into the ground. William Busbee was finally at rest, though for Libby Busbee the torture goes on.

“I was there for his first breath, and his last,” she said. “Now my daughters and me, we have to deal with what he was going through.”