YouTube and Cutting: A Dangerous Combination for Kids & Teens

Young people need help—not a message—that self-injury is okay or even glamorous.

Most of the worry swirling around kids and social media these days involves bullying—kids doing hurtful things to other kids on sites like Facebook. But on YouTube the most disturbing phenomenon is kids doing hurtful things to themselves, and sharing the videos.

A study in the March 2011 issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics highlighted these often graphic videos of adolescents engaging in what we as clinicians call "self-injury" and kids call "cutting"—on camera. Cutting is hardly new; the frightening truth is that as many as one out of four teens and adolescents self-injures. The new concern is that these videos have the effect of normalizing self-injuring behavior and therefore triggering or encouraging it.

Under pressure, YouTube said it would consider monitoring and removing the worst offenders, and noted that its site already has policies against graphic content and content that encourages dangerous activities. It relies on viewers to flag questionable videos, and self-injury videos are among those that have been removed.

But as recently as last week, when I logged on to YouTube and typed in "cutting, self-harm," the very first video to come up was a highly stylized, lengthy music video of a young girl cutting herself with a razor, a scalpel, and a pair of scissors. It was all done in black and white, save for the occasional shots of blood spilling down into a bathroom sink. As of that date the video had 18,241 views. And while it's tagged "caution, might TRIGGER," for some self-injurers, that only makes it more inviting. In one instance, YouTube asked me to click on a box saying that I was 18 before it let me get to the graphic videos. But a 10-year-old could have done the same. I'm not sure why they think the honor system is appropriate here.

Some teens say these videos, and the communities that form in the comments that follow them, give them a sense of support that they have never felt before. But that, too, can be dangerous, like alcoholics at a bar talking about how they'd like to stop drinking. Self-harm—defined as any repetitive, socially unacceptable behavior resulting in mild to moderate physical injury, without suicidal intention—is actually addictive. Catch it before the cutter has performed 10 self-harming acts and the prognosis is significantly better. After that, it's no longer just a behavior but a real addiction.

So what makes digging into their skin with sharp objects attractive to adolescents? Pain. Both the kind they want to get rid of and the kind cutting causes them.