Black girls who cut themselves, and the pain of self-injury

Sometime last year, during the course of a seemingly normal evening, I spotted an oozing gash across my daughter’s forearm. I was sitting in bed when she casually popped into my room to ask me a question. The sight of the wound jolted me awake, and I winced because it was fresh, bright red and fairly deep.

“Skylar!” I gasped, pulling her to me for a closer examination. “What happened to your arm?” She waved away my concern in the nonchalant way that 12-year-olds do when they don’t feel like being bothered to go into the details their parents demand of them.

“Oh, I scratched it on a nail on the bulletin board in music class,” she told me. I knew it was a lie.

Usually, I commence to firing her up for even attempting to get one past me. This time, I left it alone for a few days. I wanted to pay closer attention before I unfurled any accusations. A week later, I spotted another cut. Then another. And another.

The discovery sent me into a panic. What did it mean? Was she suicidal? Even if she wasn’t, could she accidentally dig too deeply into her flesh and slice a major vein? It sounds so dramatic, but visions of waking up in the morning to find her in a pool of blood made me sick with worry.

Aside from watching anguished young white girls mutilate their bodies during the occasional episode of Intervention, I’d probably never had a concerted thought about self-injury. It just wasn’t part of our reality. I certainly didn’t know anyone personally who suffered from the urge to hurt themselves and, whenever I did run across a story, it was never about a black child. As a matter of fact, that cultural aspect ultimately made our situation even more complex. It’s been challenging to shed the stigma that self-injury is confined to white kids. Even I used to think that way.

I kept my daughter’s struggle with self-injury secret for a long time – this is actually the first time I’ve shared our story with a group outside of our circle of immediate family and close friends – partly because I felt like a failure as a mother, partly because I didn’t want anyone to write her off as a troubled child or a razor-wielding psycho.

She wasn’t. My baby was cutting herself – like others before her – to vent her hurt, anger, feelings of inadequacy, awkwardness and despair. The point is not to commit suicide. The normal angst of puberty was exacerbated by a tenuous relationship with her father and drama with friends and classmates who seemed to have the most tumultuous, fine-one-day, chaotic-the-next relationships I’d ever seen, even among tweenagers. I’m sure I contributed to her frustration, too. To release the emotions she couldn’t verbally express, she cut her arm and eventually, her belly and thigh, too.

I’ve grown tired of the surprised, sometimes baffled expressions of folks who look at me like I’m crazy and make passing comments like, “That’s not something black people do.” But it is. And it’s happening more and more frequently.

A study in the British Journal of Psychiatry revealed that young black women are more likely than girls of any other race to self-harm, but the least likely to receive psychological treatment for it. And, even more surprisingly, black boys are the most likely to injure themselves. But getting help for our children is a minefield of challenges. There are financial constraints: mental health services are complicated by insurance logistics and out-of-pocket expenses. And in comparison to the litany of necessary household bills, elective treatments like therapy rank dismally low on the list of priorities.

Besides, mental health care is still roundly stigmatized in the black community. There are far, far fewer folks willing to admit they either need to or have gone to a psychologist than people who could benefit from some regular couch time – which is just about everyone at some point. The stigmas around seeing a therapist and the stereotypes around cutting have made getting help for kids suffering from the compulsion to self-injure that much harder. Together with the difficulty of finding a counselor who would even bother returning my calls, even in my urgency, it’s been a frustrating experience on so many levels.

In real life, not knowing exactly what triggers my daughter’s desire to cut has been frightening, to the point of being scared to discipline her for fear any kind of punishment will send her into a tailspin. On bad days, when she would come home from school upset or get scolded at home, I’d move her into my room at bedtime and trail her to the bathroom to keep her from cutting. I’ve herded the household scissors into a hiding place, but when the scissors were gone, she used paper clips. When the paper clips were snatched, she used earring posts. There’s an infinite supply of sharp-edged objects to inflict harm on the person who’s determined to self-mutilate.

Skylar’s cutting has waned over the last few months, but there are times when looking at her scars makes me want to break out in a fit of sobs. The psychiatrist we found diagnosed her with depression. But, she is holding off on medication in favor of regular sessions to try instilling the coping skills that will hopefully replace the urge to take her emotions out on her body. She’s a beautiful girl, but she wears some pretty deep war wounds. For a long time, she wouldn’t be caught in short sleeves because she was embarrassed. Sometimes I’ll catch people looking at her arm. Eventually, I’ll look into a procedure to remove the scars. For now, I’m more concerned about healing the pain she takes out on her body in the first place.

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