Males as likely to SI as females – new research
I’m pleased to bring you research that will be published on Monday, (yes, I was able to get my hands on it early) that shows that we should not assume that females are more likely to self-injure, as stated by numerous tradional reports.
Trigger Warning – Scientific language and Emotive SI language
Results
“No gender differences were observed among skin-cutters, most of whom reported experiences of trauma. BPD was recorded for a minority of those skin-cutters without a history of trauma. PBI scores discriminated between non-BPD skin cutters and non-BPD comparison participants without a history of trauma.”
Conclusions
“Although these results provide further confirmation of a potential association between prior trauma and repetitive skin-cutting, they rigorously challenge the validity of reported gender differences for this behaviour. Further, this study has
identified that repetitive skin-cutting can arise independently of BPD and prior trauma.
Clinical implications of these results and suggested directions for future research are discussed.”
LifeSIGNS has always thought that the reporting of SI in males and females has been biased; we recognise that perhaps men and boys talk about thier behaviour and their emotions in a different way to women.
LifeSIGNS is producing a ‘Male SI’ factsheet as we speak!
1 Comment
sarah
September 12, 2006I’m really glad to hear about this research. When you read information about self-harm or a book on the topic, there is always a section about the statistics of it, like there is with everything I suppose. Even still, there are so many problems with the statistics of self-harm that they are, in my opinion, often rendered useless. Many of the existing studies were done years ago, and they all tend to use slightly different criteria and definitions of self-injury.
There has been a lot of attention on the 1 in 10 girls self-harming statistic recently, which we have complained about on the blog already and even on BBC Radio Essex. Hopefully this research will receive as much attention (unlikely) and begin to address the misconception that self-harm is gender biased.