Why Do Young People Hurt Themselves

It may seem odd, says Dr. Matthew Nock, but self-injury serves many 'functions'

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Important:
If you or someone you know needs help now, call 988 or visit the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.

Harvard researcher and psychology professor Matthew Nock, PhD, describes the latest thinking about the reasons or “functions” that might drive people to self-injury. A key insight is that self-harm can have both a “positive” effect — creating a feeling, or communicating an idea — and a “negative” effect — getting rid of unwanted emotions, or stopping an activity.

Dr. Nock has also developed tools that may aid in predicting self-injurious and suicidal behavior. Check out the tests, and help with this important research, at Project Implicit Mental Health.

Transcript

Non-suicidal self-injury is a behavior that’s been around for thousands of years, and many people wonder, “What is the reason that people would cut themselves or burn themselves if not wanting to die?” Recent research suggests there is no one reason, but there are four potential reasons, or four functions, that this behavior can serve.

The primary one is that it seems to serve what we call an “automatic negative reinforcement function,” in that it helps the person calm down or remove any aversive thoughts or feelings — to get rid of bad feelings. In turn, a person might engage in self-injury for what we call “automatic positive reinforcement.” If a person is feeling nothing at all, they might engage in self-injury for self- stimulation — to feel something. So those are emotion regulating functions.

A person might also engage in self-injury for social reasons or social functions. A person might engage in self-injury for “social positive reinforcement,” which refers to self-injury in order to communicate with others, to get access to resources, to communicate distress. Or what we call “social negative reinforcement,” which refers to self-injury performed to remove some kind of unwanted situation or demands, such as to get kids at school to stop picking on me, to get my parents to stop fighting, or to get out of something that I don’t want to do. And these are what we see as the four primary reasons that people engage in self-injury.

How Are Self-Injury and Suicide Related?