“I’ve been hurting myself again and I can’t stop.”
“Everything’s too much lately. I’m so numb that I just wanna cut myself until I feel something.”
“You told me to stop carving my legs so I did. How long has it been since you last did one?”
These are all messages that surfaced on school-owned devices, devices issued to students for schoolwork, that have evolved into communication platforms.
Students express themselves on school platforms in what they write, share, search for, and reach out about. And moments like these often surface before anyone notices any physical forms of self-injury.
These digital signals can alert schools to the fact that a student may be struggling with self-harm and give staff an opportunity to connect that student with the right support.
What is self-harm?
Self-harm, otherwise known as nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI), means deliberately hurting one’s own body, usually as a way to deal with emotional pain.
It can appear in various physical forms, including:
- Cutting with sharp objects
- Burning with lighters, cigarettes, or candle wax
- Scratching or scraping the skin until it breaks
- Banging or hitting the head or body
- Pinching or piercing the skin
- Interfering with wounds so they can’t heal
Self-harm and suicide are not the same thing. For many young people, self-harm is not suicidal behavior in itself. However, self-harm can occur alongside suicidal thoughts and behaviors and can be an important indicator that a young person is experiencing significant distress.
Why do teens self-harm?
When negative emotions build up and a teen begins to feel overwhelmed, without healthy coping strategies to manage them, engaging in self-harm can feel like the one thing they have control over. Self-harm behavior can be a way to feel something when they’ve gone numb, or to regain a sense of control when everything else feels out of their hands.
That distress can come from many places: peer struggles, problems at home, academic pressure, bullying, relationships, or mental health conditions.
Self-injurious behavior is often the visible edge of a much bigger struggle, one that the right support and a mental health professional can actually help with.
Self-harm doesn’t always look like self-harm
It can be difficult to identify that a child is self-harming. Adding to that challenge for schools is the fact that students don’t always talk about self-harm in language that adults immediately recognize.
Young people use slang, euphemisms, irony, abbreviations, and coded language to talk about their experiences online. Some of this language is deliberately indirect, some develops within online communities, and some terms may look completely innocuous to an adult who doesn’t know the context.
For example, students may refer to cutting using terms such as:
- Barcode: refers to a set of parallel cuts or scars that look like a product barcode
- Yeet: a verb that, in this context, means ‘to cut oneself’
- Slicey boy/boi: an ironic term that describes a sharp object used to cut oneself
- SH: abbreviation for ‘self harm’
- Cvt: an obfuscation of the letter ‘u’ to circumvent scanning technologies
And the language changes over time, too. Students develop new euphemisms and coded expressions, modify existing terms, and borrow language from online communities. That means recognizing self-harm language can’t simply be a matter of looking for a short list of obvious keywords. Rather, it is an ever-evolving understanding of student language.
[Some self-harm terminology is more explicit and potentially triggering, so we have intentionally left some examples out of this article. If you’re interested in learning more about the language of self harm, contact us for additional information.]
How can schools recognize self-harm before it becomes a crisis?
There is not a singular way a school will discover that a student is self-harming.
Sometimes the signs are physical—a student wearing long sleeves raises their hand, the sleeve rides up, a scar gets noticed. Or maybe a change in behavior raises a concern.
Other times, a friend, parent, or the student themself reports the behavior or concern.
But sometimes, no one knows.
That’s where digital signals can provide another opportunity to recognize that something is wrong. This is the visibility gap that Digital Threat Detection is designed to close.
Don’t Let Self-Harm Signals Stay Hidden.
Digital Threat Detection helps close a critical visibility gap by identifying self-harm language on school-managed devices, giving teams another opportunity to see when a student may be struggling.
Those alerts can feed into case management, helping teams move from identifying a concern to assessing risk, managing the case, and connecting the student to the right support. The earlier your team can recognize the signals, the sooner you can act.
Download Addressing the Youth Mental Health Crisis to learn what to look for and how schools can strengthen early identification and intervention.
