“I feel relieved and less anxious after I cut. The emotional pain slowly slips away into the physical pain.”

“It’s a way to have control over my body because I can’t control anything else in my life.”

“It expresses emotional pain or feelings that I’m unable to put into words.”

“I usually feel like I have a black hole in the pit of my stomach. At least if I feel pain it’s better than nothing.”

These are some of the reasons young people have given for why they deliberately and repeatedly injure their own bodies, a disturbing and hard-to-treat phenomenon that experts say is increasing among adolescents, college students and young adults.

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