King's College London

The study, published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, explored the links between socio-demographic factors (such as age, gender, education, ethnicity), bullying victimisation, and self-harm, as well as how these factors influence the age at which the behaviour begins.

Researchers studied the records of around 8000 twins between ages 12 to 26 from the Twins Early Development Study. They found that the most common age that young people began to self-harm was 14 and that girls, LGBTQ+ young people, and bullied teenagers were more likely to self-harm and begin to self-harm at a younger age.

Overall, one in 12 of the twins retrospectively reported self-harming during adolescence or young adulthood. They found that 11.6 per cent started the behaviour between ages 17 to 21, compared to 1.5 per cent between ages 22 to 26.

The researchers also shed some light onto the reasons why young people self-harm, finding that the most common motivation was “to get relief from a terrible state of mind”, which was reported by 83.4 per cent of young people at age 21. Researchers also wanted to explore why self-harming behaviour continued into adulthood, and established that a person’s genetic vulnerability, rather than environmental factors, provided the explanation.

Filip Marzecki, the study’s first author from King’s IoPPN said, “There is a crisis in young people’s mental health in the UK and it’s vital that we identify those at risk at the earliest opportunity in an effort to prevent self-harming behaviour leading to injuries or death.

“Our study identified that this behaviour, which most commonly starts to appear around the mid-teens, can be predicted by social factors. More than four fifths of participants in this study who self-harm suggested that they do so in an effort to get relief from how they are feeling.

“Interestingly however, as people grow older, we see a switch from social factors to genetic vulnerability as an explanation as to why people continue to self-harm. This knowledge could allow clinicians to provide more targeted support in the future.”

Initiation and Stability of Self-Harm in Adolescence and Early Adulthood: Investigating Social and Aetiological Factors in Twins (Filip Marzecki, Yasmin I. Ahmadzadeh, Olakunle A. Oginni, Jean-Baptiste Pingault, Thomas A. McAdams, & Helena M. S. Zavos) was published in Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry. DOI 10.1111/jcpp.14096.

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