Are rates of self-injurious behavior increasing in the adolescent and young adult population?
This is impossible to know because we have no idea how common self-injury used to be in community populations of adolescents and young adults. There is broad consensus, however, among researchers and those who work directly with young people that the phenomenon is increasingly popular. In a recent survey we conducted of college mental health providers and secondary school counselors, nurses, and social workers, virtually all respondents indicated that self-injurious behavior has becoming increasingly prevalent in the last several years (Whitlock, Eells, Cummings, & Purington, 2007; Whitlock & Purington, 2007). In a recent decade long longitudinal cohort study of adolescent self-injury in Great Britain, researchers found a 28 percent increase in the number of adolescents who presented for self-injurious treatment at a general hospital in Oxford, England (Boyce, Oakley-Browne, & Hatcher, 2001). Although no such study has been conducted within the US, the presence of self-injury in new an
