News

Yesterday, a study was published about college students’ mental health—-disturbingly, almost half of the 5,000 college and non-college young people interviewed met the standard for a mental disorder.

Only 25% of students sought help.

The study below, by contrast, is very small but serves as an early warning system for another problems among teenagers: self-mutiliation advanced to an even more dangerous form.

Medpage Today

“A worrisome new form of self-mutilation — self-embedding — has been identified by radiologists at an Ohio children’s hospital who say the practice is closely related to suicidal behavior.

“William E. Shiels II, D.O., who is chief of radiology at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, said he and his colleagues identified 10 cases of self-embedding injury and removed 53 objects from nine of those adolescents.

“The practice takes self-cutting a step further, with the teen making a cut and then embedding an object inside the wound.”…

“The children ranged in age from 15 to 18, with a significant spike at age 17, and 90% of them were girls,” Dr. Shiels said at a press conference at the Radiological Society of North America meeting here.

“The teens were part of a longitudinal cohort of more than 500 children who had foreign bodies embedded in soft tissue.

“Most of the 500 had objects — glass, wood, and metal slivers for example — embedded as the result of accidents. But Adam Young, now a first year medical student, discovered a pattern of self-embedding behavior while working as a research assistant to Dr. Shiels.

“Unlike cutting, which causes pain and then the pain subsides with healing, embedding causes constant and increasing pain,” Dr. Shiels said.”

Source: Medpage Today,December3, 2008

Citation:
Primary source: Radiological Society of North America
Source reference: Shiels WE, et al “Self-mutilation in adolescents: radiological management of self-inflicted soft tissue foreign bodies” RSNA 2008 SSQ17-07.