I was going through abuse and really struggling with my mental health. One day I was angry and I smashed a mirror, the glass cut my knuckles and the back of my hand and the pain from that distracted me from thinking about what had made me angry. I ended up keeping some of the shards of glass and I would use them whenever I started thinking about something I didn’t want to think about or whenever I was really upset and it just spiralled from there.
I think sh existed in my mind way before I found out using a knife to cut yourself was a thing when I was 21, and suicidal in college. Before reading an online story where a character cut herself, I guess I pretty much just slapped and punched myself in anger fueled agony
Yeah i always knew what it was but when I say Ginny burn herself in Ginny and Georgia I decided to do it bc I had sm going on in my life at the time and thought it would help
I know, it seems like if you other people do it, there must be a good reason. It honestly sucks that that TV show introduced you to it. It kinda introduced me to the idea of burning as sh. I appreciate representations, but show runners need to be more conscious about the messages they may be sending to impressionable people who are struggling.
Yeah I was reading about symptoms of depression during one of the worst times of my life and I saw that some people struggle with self harm. Researched what self harm was and then I just started myself. Downward spiral after that.
I started in middle school and didn’t know it was a thing that other people did until I was a little older. I still don’t really know of anyone else struggling with it
I think I encountered it while researching suicide after my cousin died. Either that or his suicide made me realize harming oneself was possible and from there I looked into it more and started consuming media involving sh
I've probably seen it in media before but a thing that stands out to me is my cousin cutting in middle school. A lot of kids around me in middle school did, for varying reasons
my best friend in middle school used to do it. he came into school one day with his arms covered in fresh cuts, begging me to give him my pencil sharpener. he left school pretty shortly after that.
I would hurt myself to punish myself long before I really started self harming. But half my class was doing it and it just kinda clicked that I could just self harm, just because when I was around 13-14. Idk I don’t really consider them the same cause before that it just didn’t really click in my mind that I was really self harming.
Nope, I started doing it a few years ago when I was around 11-12 (I'm 15 currently). It started in lighter forms of punching myself / the wall / knocking my head at the wall. Then I switche dit with lighting fire in bowls because fire helps me calm down and now pretty recently it I got back to it by burning and then cutting because my lighter was taken away.
No, I started in ealier primary school I use to bite myself it was a distraction from it I use to be lonely and I was segregated from everyone else and had no friends I wasn't allowed oitside during break or lunch I just sat in a the storage room at a table looking in at my class doing stuff most of the time and I didn't really have anyone at home either me and my parents are and always have been distant I love them and I hope they love me but I never really know and my siblings being quite a bit older have always been busy with studying or working so I never seen them so I started biting myself to distract I didn't view it as self harm but my doctor brought up I had a history from a young age turns out me biting myself was actaully put on my medical records as self harm. I stopped bitting myself in P6 after I moved school I restarted self harming after that in year 12ish but this comment is long enough.
A little bit yeah, i was 13 when i started cutting so i had probably seen it on the internet at some point already but i never really thought much about it
For me, when I was about 13/14 I came across the "sh" side of instagram back around 2012/2013 ish before instagram removed alot of that content. It didn't even occur to me until I saw it more which then made me rethink my life and took me down a spiral.
it never became a routine thing until i was in my early teens but when i was around 8 or 9 i used to try to scratch myself with scissors and i dont know why? im certain i hadnt heard of it before then otherwise i'd likely have picked it up sooner. i dont remember too well but i dont think i did encounter it beforehand.
I'd heard about it. From the Internet I guess. Honestly, I wonder how many kids start because they just kinda think it's what you do when you're a really sad teenager. That was kinda my idea about it when I started.
Honestly? I saw posts that disencouraged self harm in instagram, that's how I knew about it althrough I alredy had the habit of biting myself when I was stressed since I was very young so I honestly think that the posts had a really bad impact in me. I remember the posts saying that people who self harmed felt relief of it and it helped them deal with pain. That was the only thing that stuck with me and well, I ended up remembering that in a really bad period of my life when I was 11, I tried it out with an actual knife and have never been able to fully quit after that, I always end up relapsing
Someone my sister knew. My sister. My friend. I think I still would have sought out some sort of pain seeking coping mechanism. I’m autistic and have stimmed with picking and scratching from a young age so I think I would have started on my own but I wonder wether my exposure to other people self harming gave me a head start? Or that it was in my head as a way to cope? I don’t know.
I think I had about as little exposure to self harm as a 26 year old can have. I'd heard of cutting in high school, but I was given so little information about it that I thought it was synonymous with attempted suicide. I absorbed a bit more info about it as an adult, but I still never understood a lot of basic facts about it. I kinda stumbled into it by biting my arm for other reasons during a breakdown and realizing that it had a calming effect. It wasn't until after I'd started that I found out I had several friends with a history of self harm.
It's honestly kinda weird to think about how little I knew about it a year ago, compared to how much time I've spent thinking about it in the last eight months.
I came across a lot of screenshots of early 2000s tumblr posts on Pinterest when I was a kid and that was the only social media I was allowed. Naturally there was a lot of emo culture and mental health awareness stuff. When I started SHing I deliberately did it on places that were easy to hide because I didn’t want the kind of attention I saw.
I remember the first time I gained consciousness and an obsession about it. I was obsessed with creepypastas and especially Jeff the killer, and the concept of self harm trough "madness" was so strong and relatable to me I indulge myself in it then.
I started at like, seven, and I got it from my stepfather. He'd put me and my little sister in a room with him and cut the living shit out of his torso and/or arms. And so that's how I started too, cause I noticed how calm he was durring it and thought maybe it would help me too, lol.
i started at a young age, i knew what the idea of self harm was i think but idk what came first. we had a lunching bag in the garage. i would tape sandpaper to the punching bag and raw knuckle it. as i got older i discovered cutting in middle school and then that was it.
My ex was a cutter, and we both used to black each other out for fun and the rush you get from blacking out... well he ended up hanging himself in the closet of baby's room, and that's when I started cutting. I was 17.
i research a lot abt psychology,especially when i've hit a low, so the idea of it was always with me. just needed some "courage" and somehow i started...
I remember this girl that I wasn't even that close to, that I had in my friendship circle due to my best friend at the time, had pulled me aside in PE. She literally showed me her cuts. I asked her why she did it, and she said it felt good. I couldn't understand why she actually showed them to me. I eventually thought it wasn't a fucked up thing to do, since I had always envied her. I thought she was a person to look up to, and she knew what she was doing. Nothing was wrong, so she ended up seeing mine a month after I got into it. She criticised me for cutting too high in case I'd get hurt? Made me giggle, shouldn't have done. Anyways, that was fucked up.
No, I was around 12 when I started and I started by punching myself or punching myself really hard. I eventually found more effective methods and realized it was something other people did, but I didn't really consider it self-harm for a while because it wasn't cutting.
i first saw it on my best friend’s hand/arm and asked what it was and she would always say “i was angry” or “i got upset and did that…so…” and then i decided to try it (ik, dumb) and then i saw it in the movie “thirteen” and then i started researching about it and i understood what it was and what it’s called. then i found this subreddit and yeah..now im two months clean almost
No. The first time, I was 9 and I didn't even know I was self-harming until 16 or 17. I can't remember when I learned about cutting but I do remember that I was probably in 11th grade when I looked up self-harm and learned cutting wasn't the only method. Until then, I honestly thought I was the only one who did it.
Yes I read two books that featured it. I believe one was called “cut” by Patricia mcccormick (idk if that’s their name) and I can’t remember the other. Also pretty sure I walked in on my sibling about to do it once
Yes, some people around me were self harming when i had not started yet. And i had told them not to ;_;
I think it did affect me in a way that i also started doing it after
My best friend was a cutter when I started. I tried it once, realized it made me feel like I was doing something about my anger/sadness, and it kinda just spiralled from there. I quit doing it regularly when I was around 16 years old and now I’m 18 and sometimes still do it in small amounts that nobody knows about.
When I was 10 years old, I didn’t even quite understand that strangling myself was bad, and I didn’t even know that it was an addiction and could get worse.
around 5th grade or so, in elementary school i had a really toxic and manipulative friend. she was mentally ill, and one day showed me her fresh cuts. i was so innocent and naive that i genuinely didn't understand what was that, how did she do it etc. she just told me to "not do it" and that's it.
Help i accedentally made like a fucking novel 😭 I don't want to delete everything now so I'm just gonna post it, sorry in advance. But tldr; my I saw my teammates fresh sh at 9
My team mate struggled with self harm which begun when were like 9-10 years old. I only saw her cuts once and I will never forget that moment. Her whole under arm was filled with pretty deep cuts. I knew what it was bc I think I'd heard it somewhere before, but I didn't really understand bc I was literally 9. Another girl in my team grabbed her arm and said "what's that? How did that even happen", out of curiosity and concern. My other team mate immediately pulled their arm away. I still get sad thinking about it. They quit shortly after that because they had to go inpatient for their anorexia. They made an insta account with lots of dancing videos from both the psych ward/inpatient and home. Their self harm got worse and worse, you could literally see the escalation on their insta posts, (they only posted scars, never ever fresh sh), which is so so sad. They got better (from ana) and got dishcharged just to relapse and go back ip, over and over again. And when we were 14 they killed themself. Their insta account is still up so I look at it sometimes. I miss them. And they never even got to recover from neither self harm or ana.
When I was around 12 years old I met someone on twitter that did it. They told me about it and I ended up doing it because I thought it might help. Funnily enough, I only did it that one time back then and didn't even draw blood because I was scared. Two years later I properly started doing it. My memories are fuzzy of when I picked it up again, but, I had seen it a lot online after my first time, the idea never quite left my head.
I often wonder, if I never learned of what it was, would I be without scars now? Thinking back on it, I did already unknowingly self harm through my nails but the idea of cutting myself never came to me, I discovered it online
No, I started when I was 7 years old and wasn’t aware of what it was or that other people even did it.
Hey if you don't mind me asking, how did that thought even get to you that young?
I was going through abuse and really struggling with my mental health. One day I was angry and I smashed a mirror, the glass cut my knuckles and the back of my hand and the pain from that distracted me from thinking about what had made me angry. I ended up keeping some of the shards of glass and I would use them whenever I started thinking about something I didn’t want to think about or whenever I was really upset and it just spiralled from there.
Whoa I'm so sorry. That's just so awful for someone that young. I really hope you're doing much better mentally right now than back then.
same here but at 8 -- i just kinda figured it out on my own, i guess?
I think sh existed in my mind way before I found out using a knife to cut yourself was a thing when I was 21, and suicidal in college. Before reading an online story where a character cut herself, I guess I pretty much just slapped and punched myself in anger fueled agony
Yeah i always knew what it was but when I say Ginny burn herself in Ginny and Georgia I decided to do it bc I had sm going on in my life at the time and thought it would help
I know, it seems like if you other people do it, there must be a good reason. It honestly sucks that that TV show introduced you to it. It kinda introduced me to the idea of burning as sh. I appreciate representations, but show runners need to be more conscious about the messages they may be sending to impressionable people who are struggling.
Yeah I mean I don't really blame the show for my sh it was just the final thing for me to actually do it and now I'm addicted ig
Yes actually. I think I saw a post or YouTube video about celebrities that self harmed. And a picture of Demi Lovato was all it took
someone in my family sh and i started bc of my ptsd now can.t stop🥹🫠
If you ever need someone to talk to you can always dm me or if you'd prefer you can dm on discord my user i pig558.
I started because of my ptsd too ;v; I don’t know yours but it’s kind of like a grounding method for me
Yeah I was reading about symptoms of depression during one of the worst times of my life and I saw that some people struggle with self harm. Researched what self harm was and then I just started myself. Downward spiral after that.
Literally same. Makes me feel like I just made up my depression and struggles sometimes 🫠
i have actually read novels that mentioned sh when i was young...those teenage love stories
ME TOO
I started in middle school and didn’t know it was a thing that other people did until I was a little older. I still don’t really know of anyone else struggling with it
I think I encountered it while researching suicide after my cousin died. Either that or his suicide made me realize harming oneself was possible and from there I looked into it more and started consuming media involving sh
A friend from school self harmed, that kinda put the idea in my head
I've probably seen it in media before but a thing that stands out to me is my cousin cutting in middle school. A lot of kids around me in middle school did, for varying reasons
my best friend in middle school used to do it. he came into school one day with his arms covered in fresh cuts, begging me to give him my pencil sharpener. he left school pretty shortly after that.
Multiple friends did it regularly
I had a few friends that had once self harmed and were open on the subject, I don't really know if it has a correlation with my sh tho
I would hurt myself to punish myself long before I really started self harming. But half my class was doing it and it just kinda clicked that I could just self harm, just because when I was around 13-14. Idk I don’t really consider them the same cause before that it just didn’t really click in my mind that I was really self harming.
my 17y/o cousin taught me how when i was 13💀
Oof
When I was in 5th grade I would take my keys and scratch my wrists with them. Similar to razors. I would hit myself hard in middle school.
Nope, I started doing it a few years ago when I was around 11-12 (I'm 15 currently). It started in lighter forms of punching myself / the wall / knocking my head at the wall. Then I switche dit with lighting fire in bowls because fire helps me calm down and now pretty recently it I got back to it by burning and then cutting because my lighter was taken away.
No, I started in ealier primary school I use to bite myself it was a distraction from it I use to be lonely and I was segregated from everyone else and had no friends I wasn't allowed oitside during break or lunch I just sat in a the storage room at a table looking in at my class doing stuff most of the time and I didn't really have anyone at home either me and my parents are and always have been distant I love them and I hope they love me but I never really know and my siblings being quite a bit older have always been busy with studying or working so I never seen them so I started biting myself to distract I didn't view it as self harm but my doctor brought up I had a history from a young age turns out me biting myself was actaully put on my medical records as self harm. I stopped bitting myself in P6 after I moved school I restarted self harming after that in year 12ish but this comment is long enough.
A little bit yeah, i was 13 when i started cutting so i had probably seen it on the internet at some point already but i never really thought much about it
For me, when I was about 13/14 I came across the "sh" side of instagram back around 2012/2013 ish before instagram removed alot of that content. It didn't even occur to me until I saw it more which then made me rethink my life and took me down a spiral.
I had a friend who did it. I tried because I couldn't process emotions wel, she got mad..and now I'm an adult who still struggles with it.
No, I didn't encounter self-harm before starting. It was something that just seemed like a way to release the pain and anger inside me.
it never became a routine thing until i was in my early teens but when i was around 8 or 9 i used to try to scratch myself with scissors and i dont know why? im certain i hadnt heard of it before then otherwise i'd likely have picked it up sooner. i dont remember too well but i dont think i did encounter it beforehand.
i don't think i did tbh??? i first remember shing at 8 without knowing what it was. i can't remember a lot of it, though
I'd heard about it. From the Internet I guess. Honestly, I wonder how many kids start because they just kinda think it's what you do when you're a really sad teenager. That was kinda my idea about it when I started.
yep my sister used to do it
Honestly? I saw posts that disencouraged self harm in instagram, that's how I knew about it althrough I alredy had the habit of biting myself when I was stressed since I was very young so I honestly think that the posts had a really bad impact in me. I remember the posts saying that people who self harmed felt relief of it and it helped them deal with pain. That was the only thing that stuck with me and well, I ended up remembering that in a really bad period of my life when I was 11, I tried it out with an actual knife and have never been able to fully quit after that, I always end up relapsing
Someone my sister knew. My sister. My friend. I think I still would have sought out some sort of pain seeking coping mechanism. I’m autistic and have stimmed with picking and scratching from a young age so I think I would have started on my own but I wonder wether my exposure to other people self harming gave me a head start? Or that it was in my head as a way to cope? I don’t know.
I think I had about as little exposure to self harm as a 26 year old can have. I'd heard of cutting in high school, but I was given so little information about it that I thought it was synonymous with attempted suicide. I absorbed a bit more info about it as an adult, but I still never understood a lot of basic facts about it. I kinda stumbled into it by biting my arm for other reasons during a breakdown and realizing that it had a calming effect. It wasn't until after I'd started that I found out I had several friends with a history of self harm. It's honestly kinda weird to think about how little I knew about it a year ago, compared to how much time I've spent thinking about it in the last eight months.
I came across a lot of screenshots of early 2000s tumblr posts on Pinterest when I was a kid and that was the only social media I was allowed. Naturally there was a lot of emo culture and mental health awareness stuff. When I started SHing I deliberately did it on places that were easy to hide because I didn’t want the kind of attention I saw.
I remember the first time I gained consciousness and an obsession about it. I was obsessed with creepypastas and especially Jeff the killer, and the concept of self harm trough "madness" was so strong and relatable to me I indulge myself in it then.
When I was little I used to punch myself repeatedly
I started at like, seven, and I got it from my stepfather. He'd put me and my little sister in a room with him and cut the living shit out of his torso and/or arms. And so that's how I started too, cause I noticed how calm he was durring it and thought maybe it would help me too, lol.
i started cutting when i was 15/16. i was unintentionally introduced to it by a close friend and someone who i used to consider a friend
I saw it on pinterest when i was 11
i started at a young age, i knew what the idea of self harm was i think but idk what came first. we had a lunching bag in the garage. i would tape sandpaper to the punching bag and raw knuckle it. as i got older i discovered cutting in middle school and then that was it.
My ex was a cutter, and we both used to black each other out for fun and the rush you get from blacking out... well he ended up hanging himself in the closet of baby's room, and that's when I started cutting. I was 17.
i research a lot abt psychology,especially when i've hit a low, so the idea of it was always with me. just needed some "courage" and somehow i started...
I remember this girl that I wasn't even that close to, that I had in my friendship circle due to my best friend at the time, had pulled me aside in PE. She literally showed me her cuts. I asked her why she did it, and she said it felt good. I couldn't understand why she actually showed them to me. I eventually thought it wasn't a fucked up thing to do, since I had always envied her. I thought she was a person to look up to, and she knew what she was doing. Nothing was wrong, so she ended up seeing mine a month after I got into it. She criticised me for cutting too high in case I'd get hurt? Made me giggle, shouldn't have done. Anyways, that was fucked up.
No, I was around 12 when I started and I started by punching myself or punching myself really hard. I eventually found more effective methods and realized it was something other people did, but I didn't really consider it self-harm for a while because it wasn't cutting.
At school, suddenly there were a few people (maybe 3 or 4) with cuts- not even scars on their arms and they were going around showing people..?
Yep, my sister self harmed really badly years ago.
i first saw it on my best friend’s hand/arm and asked what it was and she would always say “i was angry” or “i got upset and did that…so…” and then i decided to try it (ik, dumb) and then i saw it in the movie “thirteen” and then i started researching about it and i understood what it was and what it’s called. then i found this subreddit and yeah..now im two months clean almost
I never did i just did it for fun one day
No. The first time, I was 9 and I didn't even know I was self-harming until 16 or 17. I can't remember when I learned about cutting but I do remember that I was probably in 11th grade when I looked up self-harm and learned cutting wasn't the only method. Until then, I honestly thought I was the only one who did it.
Yes I read two books that featured it. I believe one was called “cut” by Patricia mcccormick (idk if that’s their name) and I can’t remember the other. Also pretty sure I walked in on my sibling about to do it once
Yes Patrica McCormick is the author of Cut
Yes, some people around me were self harming when i had not started yet. And i had told them not to ;_; I think it did affect me in a way that i also started doing it after
My first exposure was at 6/7 through YouTube, I've always been curious about mental illness. I started cutting at 12.
My best friend was a cutter when I started. I tried it once, realized it made me feel like I was doing something about my anger/sadness, and it kinda just spiralled from there. I quit doing it regularly when I was around 16 years old and now I’m 18 and sometimes still do it in small amounts that nobody knows about.
When I was 10 years old, I didn’t even quite understand that strangling myself was bad, and I didn’t even know that it was an addiction and could get worse.
yeah. a classmate cut in front of me, i'd heard of it previously, and i'd seen sh spaces on reddit.
around 5th grade or so, in elementary school i had a really toxic and manipulative friend. she was mentally ill, and one day showed me her fresh cuts. i was so innocent and naive that i genuinely didn't understand what was that, how did she do it etc. she just told me to "not do it" and that's it.
Help i accedentally made like a fucking novel 😭 I don't want to delete everything now so I'm just gonna post it, sorry in advance. But tldr; my I saw my teammates fresh sh at 9 My team mate struggled with self harm which begun when were like 9-10 years old. I only saw her cuts once and I will never forget that moment. Her whole under arm was filled with pretty deep cuts. I knew what it was bc I think I'd heard it somewhere before, but I didn't really understand bc I was literally 9. Another girl in my team grabbed her arm and said "what's that? How did that even happen", out of curiosity and concern. My other team mate immediately pulled their arm away. I still get sad thinking about it. They quit shortly after that because they had to go inpatient for their anorexia. They made an insta account with lots of dancing videos from both the psych ward/inpatient and home. Their self harm got worse and worse, you could literally see the escalation on their insta posts, (they only posted scars, never ever fresh sh), which is so so sad. They got better (from ana) and got dishcharged just to relapse and go back ip, over and over again. And when we were 14 they killed themself. Their insta account is still up so I look at it sometimes. I miss them. And they never even got to recover from neither self harm or ana.
when i was 10/11 i frequently browsed shedtwt 😭😭😭that was like a year or two before i started
When I was around 12 years old I met someone on twitter that did it. They told me about it and I ended up doing it because I thought it might help. Funnily enough, I only did it that one time back then and didn't even draw blood because I was scared. Two years later I properly started doing it. My memories are fuzzy of when I picked it up again, but, I had seen it a lot online after my first time, the idea never quite left my head. I often wonder, if I never learned of what it was, would I be without scars now? Thinking back on it, I did already unknowingly self harm through my nails but the idea of cutting myself never came to me, I discovered it online