People share stories about self-injuring

By Sonya Colberg, The Oklahoman


Almost instinctively, she grabbed the orange-handled scissors on the counter.

Kirsten Steadman (pictured at right) softly opened the dull blades and began sawing into the soft, ivory skin of her leg. Bright red blood jolted her back to painful reality. She jumped away from the counter and flung the scissors.

For Jane Jones, it began with the gleaming, perfect packs of razor blades her mother kept among her art supplies. She made tiny marks and slices in her tender 9-year-old skin at first. By her teen years, she'd cut deeper and deeper, on top of her arms, beneath her T-shirt sleeves.

"I don't tell anybody. I don't even tell boyfriends. It's just too weird for other people to understand. It's like a red flag to people. They're like, 'Hmmm, if this girl did that ...,'" said Jones, who doesn't want her real name used.

For Jason Smith, the first slits to his wrist served as a memorial to his first love — a beautiful, pale, teen dancer who often talked about cutting herself and ultimately committed suicide. He wasn't allowed to attend her funeral because her parents wrongly blamed him for her death, he said.

"It was a good way to taste the pain," said Smith, who didn't want his real last name used.

Steadman, Jones and Smith are the faces of young cutters.

Called self-injuring, non-suicidal self-injuring and self-mutilating, the practice exists among an estimated 2 million to 3 million Americans, experts think.

"It's definitely a very serious problem," said Dr. Swapna Deshpande, a University of Oklahoma Physicians child psychiatrist. "It is really scary. Normal teenagers can get into this just to experiment and try something new. But then they can get into the habit."

Other forms of self-injury include burning, hair- or skin-pulling, skin-ripping and drinking of toxic substances. Cutting is one of the most popular.

Damage can range from superficial scratches to lifelong scarring and disfigurement.

Experts warn that cutters are good at hiding the habit. They often conceal their scars and fresh injuries under long sleeves, long pants, bracelets and tattoos.

Rather than moving toward suicide, people often self-injure to cope with overwhelming bad feelings, studies show. But about 40 percent of self-injurers consider suicide, and some succeed, sometimes accidentally.

Researchers have found links between self-injury and child abuse. It also has been linked to eating disorders, post-traumatic stress disorder, borderline personality disorder, anxiety disorders and depression.

Some report going into a trance-like state as they cut themselves.

"I remember feeling really detached from everything and everybody in the world. Almost like it wasn't real," said Jones, a 27-year-old Oklahoma City artist studying to become a barber.

"I remember when I did that, it kind of brought me back to the moment to feeling something. Even feeling pain was better than feeling kind of numb."

Though she's fine now, Jones has hundreds of scars on both upper arms hidden by tattoos.

The cutters who want attention are more fortunate than those who hide it and face the potential risk of not getting help.

"I was always real clean. I never wanted it to look like a freaking crazy thing on my arms. Didn't want people to go: 'What? Did a freaking tornado of knives hit your arms?'" Smith said.

Deshpande said the incidences of cutting were seen about age 13 or 14, but more recently, cutting is showing up in 11- and 12-year-olds. Often, cutters feel no one understands them. Cutting seems to help release the emotions and cause the cutter to think about something besides the emotional pain.

"It's like the blood was my release. That's when I felt immediate release. My emotions were expressed," said Steadman, whose first experience occurred when she couldn't cope with a friend's rape.

The 28-year-old Salt Lake City-area resident became a therapist and wrote a book, "Snowflake Obsidian, Memoir of a Cutter," under her pen name Hippie with Anger Issues.

"But directly after that came the self-hatred for what I had done. There's definitely a shame cycle with cutting."

Research also shows that cutting can become addictive.

Smith, a 32-year-old Edmond-area musician, still occasionally cuts himself when he's upset or sees a razor blade.

"The attraction is the addiction. The addiction is the attraction," he said. "You can become addicted to seeing the blood."

As an outgrowth of dabbling in traditional religion and the occult, Smith introduced friends to cutting. They saw some of the cuts to his wrists, forearms, shoulders, chest and neck and tried cutting themselves, with one ending up in a mental hospital.

"It's not something I'm proud of, believe me. It's something I have to live with," Smith said.

Jones said parents and family need to watch out for signs in loved ones.

"If you see one cut, there's more. There's going to be more after that," Jones said.