Self-harm survey belies major problem in NW

The final report of the Northern Ireland Lifestyle and Coping Survey, 2010, found adolescent harm a major public health concern in Northern Ireland.

It found one in ten young people here reported that they had self-harmed at some stage with girls being 3.5 times more likely to engage in self-harm than boys.

Equally, thoughts of self-harm without actually doing so were also common, with a further 22 per cent reporting such thoughts at some stage in their lives. The most common method of self-harm was self-cutting followed by overdose.

But the results of the study surprised the authors by showing reported rates here less than in ROI and the UK.

This bucked the trend of recent research which found rates of self-harm higher in the wider Londonderry, Tyrone, Fermanagh area than elsewhere on the island.

The report states: "The prevalence of lifetime self-harm among Northern Irish adolescents was significantly lower than that reported in the Republic of Ireland, Scotland and England.

"This lower rate was unexpected given that the rates of hospital-treated self-harm in the Western Health Board Region (Two Year Report of NI Registry of Deliberate Self-Harm, 2010) are higher than in the Republic of Ireland and England and the suicide rate in Northern Ireland has grown markedly in recent years (Largey et al., 2009; Two Year Report of NI Registry of Deliberate Self-Harm, 2010)."

The authors suggested this could have been due to schools protecting against self-harm in Northern Ireland, more so than elsewhere in UK and Ireland; The Troubles and sectarianism inhibiting disclosure of personally sensitive information; or a methodological shortcoming in the study.

The report concludes that the Troubles probably resulted in a reluctance on the part of the post-primary participants of the survey in disclosing information.

It states: "It is, however, possible that one of the unseen consequences of The Troubles is that respondents in Northern Ireland are, generally, more reluctant to disclose personally sensitive information.

"Indeed, work by Muldoon and colleagues supports this postulation, as their research suggests that adolescents in "Northern Ireland are more cautious in terms of self-disclosure in general (Muldoon, 2004; Muldoon et al., 2007).

"This is further supported when we inspect the percentage of adolescents who provided written descriptions of their self-harm episode.

"A significantly lower proportion of young people in Northern Ireland provided such details in comparison to those in England or Scotland, for example.

"Consequently, we would conclude that there is reasonable circumstantial evidence to suggest that the actual self-harm rate is higher than what we found in the present study."