Each month Connect focuses on a specific area that professionals tell us they want to explore in more detail.
How common is it?
Self-harm is much more common than many adults realise. In large UK studies, around one in four girls and one in five boys report self-harming during adolescence. Suicide attempts are much less common but still affect a substantial minority. Childhood adversity, particularly persistent poverty combined with parental mental ill-health, further increases the risk. (Patalay & Fitzsimons, 2021, Adjei et al., 2026).
Keeping risk in proportion
Self-harm matters because it is a strong signal of suicide risk: around half of young people under 25 who die by suicide have previously self-harmed (NCISH, 2017). But the reverse is not true. The great majority of young people who self-harm do not go on to take their own lives, and most adolescent self-harm stops by early adulthood (Moran et al., 2012). So every episode deserves a careful, compassionate assessment, but not alarm. A calm, curious response is more likely to keep a young person talking than a panicked one.
What helps?
When young people themselves have been asked what helped after self-harming, they most often describe support from trusted friends, family members and sometimes even pets. Professional help receives much more mixed reviews - CAMHS was named as both most and least helpful by similar numbers, and emergency and social services were often seen as unhelpful (Holland et al., 2020). What helps varies from one young person to the next, and the people around them every day matter a great deal.
This fits NICE's 2022 guideline (NG225), which for the first time sets out a role for schools: treat the young person with respect, attend to physical needs and safeguarding, seek advice from health or social care, have a designated lead and a self-harm policy, and consider the impact on friends.
A review of 18 trials (Meza et al., 2023) found that effective therapies share common elements rather than a single brand: caregiver involvement alongside individual work, a strong alliance, individualised formulation, emotion-regulation and problem-solving skills, ongoing monitoring, and collaborative safety planning, including restricting access to means.
Thursday 15th, 12pm – 1pm. This session will take place on Zoom.
Join our free community event on supporting children and young people who self-harm, with learning from the ongoing work in Wales.
Bringing together the national approach taken by NHS Wales and expertise through lived experience, this session will be led by Hannah Wenden and Si Martin.
Hannah Wenden is Project Manager for Children and Young People in the Suicide Prevention and Self-harm Programme at NHS Wales Performance and Improvement. Si Martin is the founder of Heads Above The Waves (HATW), a non-profit that helps young people find healthy, creative alternative coping mechanisms. Si's lived experience inspired him to found HATW in 2013.
Together, Hannah and Si will show how evidence, policy, lived experience and practice perspectives come together to improve support for children and young people across all communities and sectors.
The session will help you understand self-harm, feel confident starting conversations, recognise helpful and unhelpful responses, and find further resources.
