In the latest statistics, it showed that the number of people who practice self-mutilation has increased. Health AtoZ reports that a source says that around 0.75 % of the American population are in the habit of either cutting, biting, bruising or even amputating themselves in severe cases. That percentage seem low but that is actually 75 mutilators in a thousand people and that doesn’t include those who are secretly doing the habit for fear of being discovered.

 

A high percentage of people who are into hurting themselves are teenage girls. There is no concrete reason as to why they do this but one of them is due to violence itself. Some of them where physically abused causing them to be disgusted with themselves. They may also direct their anger in form of self-mutilation at the person violating them since they do not have the power/strength to show their anger against the aggressor.

Self mutilation is starting to become common even for teenagers who are merely filled with teenage angst but there are other people who feels that they have deeper need for mutilation. HealthAtoZ enumerates them as:

• Self-mutilation relieves unbearable tension or anxiety Many self-mutilators do report feeling relief after an episode of self-cutting or other injury.

• Self-mutilation is a technique for triggering the body’s biochemical responses to pain. Stress and trauma release endorphins, which are the body’s natural pain-killing substances

• Self-mutilation is a way of stopping a dissociative episode. Dissociation is a process in which the mind splits off, or dissociates, certain memories and thoughts that are too painful to keep in conscious awareness. Some people report that they feel “numb” or “dead” when they dissociate, and self-injury allows them to feel “alive.”

• Self-mutilation is a symbolic acting-out of the larger culture’s mistreatment of women. This theory is sometimes offered to explain why the great majority (about 75%) of self-mutilators are girls and women

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 4th, 2008 at 11:47 pm and is filed under Self Mutilation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.