Warning — if you’re squeamish about this kind of topic, you may want to avoid reading this entry.

You may have heard of self-injury. That’s when a person injures themselves — usually through making minor cuts in their arms, legs, or wrists — in an effort to deal with their emotional pain. While a phenomenon that’s been around for decades (and likely longer in secret), it’s one that many mental health professionals remain uneasy with discussing with their clients.

But a specific type of self-injury — self-embedding — has just been reported, although it too has likely been going on for years with little notice from professionals. Self-embedding is what it sounds like: people embed objects under their skin, in a variation on the theme of self-injury. The objects sometimes bring a person who does it some emotional relief, like a lucky stone a person might keep in their pocket.

Researchers last week reported at a professional conference that they had found a way to easily and painlessly identify whether a person had engaged in self-embedding:

Using ultrasound or fluoroscopy, a type of X-ray that provides moving images, doctors were able to detect both metallic and non-metallic objects, which then could be removed through small incisions in the skin. The approach left little scarring and did not cause the objects to fragment.

Nobody really knows how prevalent this behavior is, since studies to date have all been on very small groups of people. But it appears to be most prevalent amongst teenage girls. But some suggest it might account for up to 15% of those who self-injure, which is estimated at between 14% and 39% of adolescents, which extrapolates up to 6% of all teens engaging in self-embedding.

What can be done about self-embedding behavior? Well, since it’s just a form of self-injury, the same treatments that work for it will likely also work for self-embedding behavior. Namely, psychotherapy. A person who self-injures often does so to relieve emotional pain. Psychotherapy can teach a person to express and find relief for such pain in other, less physically-abusing ways. The sooner one learns such ways, the sooner self-injurious behavior can end.

Read the full article: Method detects self-injury

Dr. John Grohol is the CEO and founder of Psych Central. He is an author, researcher and expert in mental health online, and has been writing about online behavior, mental health and psychology issues -- as well as the intersection of technology and human behavior -- since 1992. Dr. Grohol sits on the editorial board of the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking and is a founding board member and treasurer of the Society for Participatory Medicine.

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From Self-Injury to… Self-Embedding? - World of Psychology | kozmom (12/8/2008)

    Last reviewed: By John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on 8 Dec 2008
    Published on PsychCentral.com. All rights reserved.