By ANISSA FRITZ

The television blares this week’s episode of “Glee.” The parents are out of town for the weekend. April’s warm weather welcomes summer’s debut.

But on this Thursday evening, the seasons weren’t the only thing changing for 13 year-old Samantha.

“The house was empty, my brother opens up the door and so he’s yelling down ‘Samantha we have to go, we have to go now.’ And I said, ‘Can you wait? Do we have to?’ And he was like, ‘Jess just tried to kill herself. We have to go.’ So I pause the TV right on Jay Lynch’s face.”

Samantha’s sister Jess, gobbled a bottle of pills.

This is the night Samantha first experienced self-harm. Samantha was in seventh grade when she was forced to pause on Jay Lynch’s face. She was in eighth grade when she had to repeat that night, this time with her older brother the victim. At the time, Samantha would have never imagined that four years later, she would follow the cycle of self-harm that engulfed her family.

In a 2011 report, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) cited 836,000 emergency room visits for self-inflicted injury. But a 2002 study of Massachusetts’ college students concluded that those who partake in self-harm tend to be highly functional in the community. They are oftentimes overlooked and rarely receive treatment.

Sociologists Peter and Patricia Adler are among the top researchers of self-injury. In one of their studies, they concluded:

“Psychologist consider self-injury a practice that emerges spontaneously in troubled individuals, yet we note the more widespread social learning of self-injury that has been transmitted through the media, health education, and peer group interaction.”

Middle school troubles

Now in college, self-harm for David, Amanda, and many other current KU students, began in middle school.

“One of my friends had actually told me that he has started to cut and it just came as kind of like a shock to me,” David said. “I didn’t fully understand it. … and then within a year I had felt compelled to do it myself.”

Brian Donovan, University of Kansas associate professor in the sociology, said the sociological and psychological studies of self-injury reveal that the phenomenon occurs much more frequently in younger people, specifically those in middle school and high school.

David was in the eighth grade. David played football. David got stressed. David found a pair of scissors on his desk, and began carving into his shoulders.

Today, the scars at the back of his shoulders remain. David calls them “fun conversation starters” as he feigns a laugh.

Adler and Adler’s study reported that the most common behaviors of self-mutilation took place in the form of needle sticking, skin cutting, and scratching.

But tendencies evolve. David escalated his self violence outside the norm.

“I sometimes hit myself uh, on the side of my head. I’ve actually bruised myself several times and I uh… this sounds really weird I’ve never really said it out loud but I bite myself,” Davis said. “I bite my fingers specifically. Sometimes till they bleed.”

The eighth grade version of Amanda ripped at her hair until brown chunks filled her tightly wound fists. She clawed at any part of her body she could grab. She ripped at herself until her skin came undone, finally producing blood.

Having a favorite safety pin to inflict self-harm, keeping a bedside jar of needles, taking a cigarette lighter to the wrists, scratching skin until bleeding, pulling hair until chunks are removed, punching or head butting walls are all scenarios of self-harm.

Although they are now in college, self-harm was gruesome and popular for these pre-teens. Sometimes, it was only that: a popularity contest.

“I don’t know if I thought it was cool or if I really intended to do it,” KU senior Tara said.

She told her friends she had been self-harming because she felt alone. Her friends reacted with both shock and acceptance. All her eight-grade peers participated. She wanted to be part of the group.
But self-injury wasn’t just popular in social groups.

Self-harm was already plastered deep within in the crevasses of Samantha’s home-life. But the ideas, thoughts, images, and discussion of self-mutilation oozed into her social life and leisure time as well.

“You see these things online or you read about it somewhere or you see it on TV and you’re like, ‘Oh I could try that, maybe it will help’,” Samantha said.

According to the Cornell Research Program, “The risk for contagion is increased when high-status or “popular” peers are engaged in self-injury or when self-injury is used as a means for students to feel a sense of cohesiveness or belonging to a particular group.”

Cornell Research has identified the social aspects that occur in educational settings that promote middle school and high school students to partake in self-harm either mostly, or purely because their friends do it. (See sidebar).

Samantha’s story

But the act of self-harm was all too real for Samantha. It was something she understood and even embraced. Her situation was “in style” during her middle school and high school years, but it was not fleeting. Self-harm’s presence in Samantha’s life couldn’t be changed with a new wardrobe or school environment.

Living in the shadow of her siblings’ traumatic events, to ensure Samantha would live a healthy life her mother sent her to a therapist. But 18 months of therapy did little to end the family cycle. As a high school junior, Samantha started self-harm.

At first, Samantha used a lighter against her skin, but it made a rotten smell and hurt like hell. She tried cutting, the most common method of mutilation, but cutting wasn’t fulfilling either.

“I didn’t like the process of, I hate the word. I hate the ‘C word’,” she said. “I hated the process of cutting because it hurt and I have a really low pain tolerance. But I really liked the outcome of it.”

She stopped trying. Life went on. She went to school, went to therapy, all while being given the constant reminder by her older sister that the family’s long list of issues came to life by Samantha’s doing.

As the youngest, Samantha’s siblings would pester, tease, and dote on her.. Being lowest in birth order, Samantha would report the incidents to her father.

But he was not a forgiving man.

“He would hit them,” she said. “And it wasn’t an in-private kind of thing it was like a, we are all sitting at the dinner table kind of thing and things would escalate and we all are just kind of watching this happen.”

But it wasn’t the disrupted family meals, her father’s tirades, her brother’s bruises, or her mother’s silence that pushed Samantha over the edge.

It was 12 words.

“Is it tough for you because you feel like it’s your fault?”

This string of words put together and spat out by her sister began to fester.

One day, while re-arranging her room Samantha knocked a mirror to the hardwood floor. Glass shattered and scattered in a beautifully chaotic pattern at her feet.

Suddenly, the outcome outweighed the pain; Samantha cut.

“There was this really big shard and I thought, ‘Wow, that’s actually super sharp.’ So yeah, I did it with a sharp shard of mirror. I mean how poetic is that,” she laughed.

Although research suggests that self-harm tends to be something that adolescents “grow out of,” David, Amanda, and Samantha did not.

David said he does it because he hates himself.

“It’s like a punishment,” he said.

For Amanda, it’s a cry for help.

“It really is yourself attacking yourself. It’s a physical way of expressing the emotions that are inside your head,” she said. “I picture it like I’m two separate entities at that time so I’m trying to pretty much hurt what is hurting me but in actuality I’m really just hurting myself.”

For Samantha, it’s a battle scar.

“There’s something about having, God it sounds so weird when I say it but… there’s something almost respectable about having scars. It’s like having something on the outside to show for what you’re feeling on the inside.”
Among the three KU students, only David seeks treatment at KU’s Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS) where they provide a therapist at Watkin’s Memorial Health Clinic.

Watkins offers help through the CAPS therapists, “Campus Blues” (a self-help website), and the single mental health nurse practitioner. If students choose to make an appointment with a medical examiner, the doctor will then refer the student to counseling. Whether that counseling is through CAPS or an outside therapist is up to the discretion of the medical examiner.

Anissa Fritz is a University of Kansas senior from Dallas majoring in Journalism and Mass Communications.