Ontario: There is an alarming trend in teenagers posting videos on the largest video portal – YouTube — showing self-cutting and other forms of self-harm which may force them to reinforce that attitude.
A Canadian study of non-suicidal self-harm videos posted on YouTube suggests they could be reinforcing self-injury behavior and urges professionals working with young people to make themselves aware of their scope and content.
A study published in the journal Pediatrics from the University of Guelph in Ontario and McGill University in Montreal, Quebec.
Lead researcher, Dr Stephen Lewis, Professor in the Department of Psychology at Guelph, suggested vulnerable teenagers might see this behavior as acceptable and difficult to overcome, leading them to harm themselves.
The study is thought to be the first to examine the effect, especially on young people, of the most popular depictions of self-harm shown on YouTube videos.
The Internet can be a good and bad thing for vulnerable young people, as Lewis explained.
“Many youth who self-injure may go online to find support, but at the same time they may see videos that could be harmful if self-injury is depicted as typical behaviour or if viewing these videos triggers the behaviour,” Lewis said.
The study shows that between 14% and 24% of teenagers and young adults have self-injured at least once and self-injury as the “deliberate destruction of one’s own body tissue”, for instance by cutting or burning, without intending to commit suicide.
Lewis said the idea that teenagers do it for attention is a “misconception” because it’s often secretive and typically to cope with negative emotions.
For their study, the researchers did Google searches of YouTube using the keywords “self-injury” and “self-harm” and selected the 50 most viewed videos showing an actual person (including some live footage of self-injury), and the 50 most viewed that did not show a person but descriptions and photographs of self-injury.
The 100 videos had been viewed more than 2 million times altogether, and most of them showed quite graphic photographs of self-injury. The videos were selected as favorites over 12,000 times on the site.
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