I remember when I was in middle school there was a big awareness campaign around cutting. Assemblies, guest speakers, special sessions of health class, material sent home to parents, etc. Immediately, the number of (predominantly) young women cutting went way up - or at least the number cutting in highly visible locations did. The next year things were mostly back to "normal". Of course there's no way to know for sure, it's entirely possible that those people prominently displaying scars would have been self harming in some other way without the campaign, but it was striking to 7th grade me.
Don't misunderstand me, I don't mean to imply that cutting didn't exist before or stopped existing afterward. And I'll grant that middle schoolers may not be the most representative population. But from an early age I observed that
a. While mental illness has always existed, the specific ways in which it manifests can be extremely malleable, and
b. When you make it clear to people - especially awkward, insecure young people - that compulsive behavior X will result in receiving large amounts of sympathy and positive attention, expect rates of compulsive behavior X to go up. To be clear that doesn't necessarily mean people are *faking* behavior X (although in hindsight I suspect some of those scars were drawn on), but when social incentives are powerful and sudden people will alter their behavior in surprisingly radical ways.
Attention caught because I think this adds to my understanding of the anorexia contagion power/mechanism!
(uh whoops a little personal/heavy)
A different angle -- I grew up pretty prone to deliberate self-injury as a self-soothing technique, and while it was probably never *great*, it never felt like a *problem* until I was a cutter (in my late teens, to my embarrassment/shame at the time).
And the 'misc self-hurt' -> 'cutting, specifically' was pretty culturally mediated, where one day I was in my room having a bad time and wanting to ground myself in a way that I'd been able to do from injury before, trying to figure out *how*, and I realized I was holding scissors, and *duh*, cutting existed. Felt kinda silly for not thinking of it earlier. (*Really* silly, given that I was grinding the point of the scissors into my leg and being dissatisfied with the level of distraction.)
But ALSO 'cutting, specifically' turns out to be particularly attractive (in a statistical sense) form of self-injury because it's practically very easy, and the neurochem state after is strong enough to notice, but it's brief (seconds, unless you manage to really hurt yourself), and you build tolerance, and it (for me, with the shame) maybe makes the instigating unhappiness worse once you're thinking about it. Addiction is complicated but cutting is more habit-friendly than any self-harm I came up with on my own.
Anorexia seems like it involves some maybe similar self-reinforcing physical feedback loops.
Cutting is self-explanatory in how-to, but I think there's a relevant 'teaching at-risk people' -> 'accidental habit escalation' for anorexia, in the form of diet/life habits that marginal people will try if they hear about, and that happen to be unusually self-perpetuating in that particular form.
(I guess as a 'please no one be concerned' but also an 'obligatory other hand?' follow up -- I quit cutting, there's a lot of resources for people quitting cutting, and I actually quit habitual self-injury in general, and it turns out the cutting resources work for that too.)
I remember when I was in middle school there was a big awareness campaign around cutting. Assemblies, guest speakers, special sessions of health class, material sent home to parents, etc. Immediately, the number of (predominantly) young women cutting went way up - or at least the number cutting in highly visible locations did. The next year things were mostly back to "normal". Of course there's no way to know for sure, it's entirely possible that those people prominently displaying scars would have been self harming in some other way without the campaign, but it was striking to 7th grade me.
Don't misunderstand me, I don't mean to imply that cutting didn't exist before or stopped existing afterward. And I'll grant that middle schoolers may not be the most representative population. But from an early age I observed that
a. While mental illness has always existed, the specific ways in which it manifests can be extremely malleable, and
b. When you make it clear to people - especially awkward, insecure young people - that compulsive behavior X will result in receiving large amounts of sympathy and positive attention, expect rates of compulsive behavior X to go up. To be clear that doesn't necessarily mean people are *faking* behavior X (although in hindsight I suspect some of those scars were drawn on), but when social incentives are powerful and sudden people will alter their behavior in surprisingly radical ways.
Attention caught because I think this adds to my understanding of the anorexia contagion power/mechanism!
(uh whoops a little personal/heavy)
A different angle -- I grew up pretty prone to deliberate self-injury as a self-soothing technique, and while it was probably never *great*, it never felt like a *problem* until I was a cutter (in my late teens, to my embarrassment/shame at the time).
And the 'misc self-hurt' -> 'cutting, specifically' was pretty culturally mediated, where one day I was in my room having a bad time and wanting to ground myself in a way that I'd been able to do from injury before, trying to figure out *how*, and I realized I was holding scissors, and *duh*, cutting existed. Felt kinda silly for not thinking of it earlier. (*Really* silly, given that I was grinding the point of the scissors into my leg and being dissatisfied with the level of distraction.)
But ALSO 'cutting, specifically' turns out to be particularly attractive (in a statistical sense) form of self-injury because it's practically very easy, and the neurochem state after is strong enough to notice, but it's brief (seconds, unless you manage to really hurt yourself), and you build tolerance, and it (for me, with the shame) maybe makes the instigating unhappiness worse once you're thinking about it. Addiction is complicated but cutting is more habit-friendly than any self-harm I came up with on my own.
Anorexia seems like it involves some maybe similar self-reinforcing physical feedback loops.
Cutting is self-explanatory in how-to, but I think there's a relevant 'teaching at-risk people' -> 'accidental habit escalation' for anorexia, in the form of diet/life habits that marginal people will try if they hear about, and that happen to be unusually self-perpetuating in that particular form.
(I guess as a 'please no one be concerned' but also an 'obligatory other hand?' follow up -- I quit cutting, there's a lot of resources for people quitting cutting, and I actually quit habitual self-injury in general, and it turns out the cutting resources work for that too.)