Self-harm of the skin is a complex problem encountered mainly in adolescents and young adults. The aim of the study was to assess the prevalence of deliberate cutaneous self-harm without suicidal intent among secondary school teenagers of the Lodz region. A self-administered specially designed anonymous questionnaire was delivered to 1,448 secondary school teenagers, aged 12-19 years. The lifet...

Objective: This study aimed to investigate the issues related to the formation and persistence of deliberate self-harm behavior in adolescents from Iranian mental health professionals' viewpoints. Method: The present qualitative study used a semi-structured interview to record the experiences of 9 mental health professionals with work experience in deliberate self-harm behavior in adolescence...

A retrospective study of 90 adolescents admitted to a district general hospital after deliberate drug overdoses was carried out. Underlying risk factors, the inpatient assessment, and the initial management offered to each patient were recorded. The longer term outcomes were assessed, with particular emphasis on psychiatric and related disorders. Many had underlying family problems; the parents...

Editorial Deliberate and accidental self-harm. One of the great privileges of editing a journal is seeing how, through the peer review process, a journal issue often develops a subject theme without much help from the editorial staff. This issue contains three stark papers on a topical area of medicine – psychiatry – and particularly the areas of addiction, suicide and death. The incidence of s...

Fifty adult patients presenting with deliberate self-harm at the Royal Victoria Hospital were given a choice of nine reasons for their actions. Most chose more than one reason and all but two of the 24 who said that they wished to die chose at least one other motive. There were no trends with respect to sex, past history, or method of deliberate self-harm. These results illustrate the complexit...

This prospective study was aimed to analyze the nature of and the factors associated with deliberate self-poisoning in children below the age of 12 years. Children referred to the Child Guidance Clinic for evaluation after recovery from the effects of poisoning during the five-year period between 1999 and 2003 formed the subjects of the study. The children were evaluated for stress factors, psy...

OBJECTIVE Research on deliberate self-harm (intentionally injuring oneself without suicidal intent) has focused on clinical and forensic populations. Studying only these populations, which typically have serious psychopathology, may lead to inflated estimates of the association between self-harm and psychiatric disorder, as well as of the prevalence of deliberate self-harm. The present study in...