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It had been four days since Jae Janea had spoken to anyone. The loneliness was setting in. Dark thoughts were becoming overwhelming. So on a summer evening last year she walked into a dollar store and bought a pack of razor blades.
Janea went home and cut her wrists. She thought she was ready to go. Instead she called her best friend who told her to make a tourniquet. When her friend arrived, she helped bandage Janea’s wounds. The next morning they went to urgent care.
“It was in that moment when I realized I don’t want to be gone. I just don’t want to feel this intense pain. I was trying to find a way to make it stop,” she said. “But it was absolutely not the appropriate way. I wish I could tell myself differently then.”
Janea struggled with self-harm for many years before her suicide attempt. Since then, Janea has put additional measures in place so she doesn’t find herself in that situation again. Amping up her therapy sessions, eating balanced meals, engaging in physical activity, and learning to create space between herself and her emotions.
At times, she admits, she still feels the urge to harm herself. And the 22-year-old is not alone in her feelings.
National research shows emergency room visits connected to self-harm climbed through 2021, and the numbers remain elevated above pandemic-levels in California even as other indicators of mental distress have declined. In the California 2026 State of the Girl Report, nearly a quarter of grade 7 girls report self-harm.
In a recent UC Berkeley analysis, researchers found an increase of multiracial adolescent girls being treated for self harm injuries in California hospitals.
Overall the number of adolescents in the state engaging in self-harm is increasing, Emily Liu, lead author of the UC Berkeley report said. With the use of inpatient and emergency department hospital discharge data from 2005 to 2021, more than 70% were girls. By 2021, rates were highest among multiracial, white, and Black girls aged 15 to 19 years old.
California policymakers have paid close attention to youth mental health during Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration, including backing a voter-approved 2024 ballot measure that dedicated billions of dollars to building more capacity for treatment. Newsom also supported a $4.3 billion surge in funding for youth mental programs in the budget he signed in 2022.
More recently the California Department of Public Health developed California’s Population-Based Prevention Program Final Plan with the goal of reducing suicide, self-harm, overdose, and behavioral health disparities.
But students and representatives from schools say gaps remain. Newsom vetoed bills in 2022 and in 2023 that would have further expanded youth mental health services.
Shalini Mustala, a researcher at the Public Policy Institute of California, said at the legislative hearing that the rate of depressive symptoms and suicidality in teens has steadily risen since 2009. And hospitalizations for self harm, post COVID-19, still remain elevated.
“Ongoing evaluation of these investments will play an important role in refining strategies for effectively addressing student mental health needs,” Mustala said.
Dr. Janis Whitlock, an emeritus research scientist at Cornell University who has studied self-injury for more than 20 years, said self-injury is a risk factor for suicide but it’s not the same thing.
Non-suicidal self-injury, often used interchangeably with self-harm, happens when someone repeatedly injures themselves to provide temporary emotional relief. The most common forms include cutting, scratching, and burning.
Most people who self-harm do not end up in the emergency room. If an adolescent harmed themselves at school, oftentimes Whitlock explains, school protocol is to call 911 to report a suicide attempt. It’s unlikely an adolescent would voluntarily go to the hospital for self harm injuries.
“Most of the time people who self-injure don’t want to end up in an ER,” she said. “That isn’t their goal. The goal is to feel better. The goal is to be able to function.”
‘Self-harm has always happened in the Black community’
Dawn L. Brown, president and CEO of EmpowHer, isn’t new to supporting teens who self-harm. The Los Angeles nonprofit works with Title 1 schools across the county and annually serves about 1,000 girls of color from low-income communities.
Nationally, about 17% of teens report some form of self injury, but studies show an even higher risk among college students — with a range of 17-35%. Some of the top concerns girls are dealing with, Brown said, include the fear of school shootings, threats to body autonomy, immigration, and financial security.
In the recent State of the Girl report from Girl Scouts USA, nonbinary students report the highest level of emotional distress with 61% reporting chronic sadness and more than half of grade 9 nonbinary students report self-harm.
“So many of our girls are feeling this overwhelming sense that they are being attacked for who they are. We do have a large population of LGBTQIA+ youth,” she said. “I think that plays a big role as to why we’re seeing an increase of Black and Latina girls (self-harming) because they are being ignored and disregarded.”
There’s a strong link between self-injury and trauma. Although some studies show demographic differences in who self-injures based on ethnicity and socioeconomic status, Whitlock said the differences aren’t by a lot. Nationally, the data shows the rates of young girls self harming continue to increase.
Self-harm “absolutely is stigmatized as a white girl problem, historically it has not impacted us in the same way, but self-harm has always happened in the Black community,” Brown said. “From a cultural standpoint we tend to sweep those things under the rug, we don’t have open conversations about those things, the idea is … don’t put our business out there in the street.”
Hopelessness turned into hope
Janea describes her childhood as traumatic. As a biracial teen, she felt she didn’t always have the necessary support. Things really took a turn when she was 12. Her father tried to kill her mother and cousin. And attempted to kidnap her. He was later taken to prison.
Eight months later, at 13, she attempted suicide.
While in the psychiatric hospital, she found it hard to be honest with her therapist. Around this time is when she started self-harming. In the years that followed, she was in and out of outpatient psychiatric care.
But things “kept happening” in life and a strong sense of “hopelessness” was ever present. Plus she knew shutting down with her therapist wasn’t helping.
“I got sexually assaulted (at 15), that caused me to open up too because that made me feel very uncomfortable with myself,” Janea said. “Hearing those comforting and reassuring words from a therapist is what I needed to hear instead of what I was hearing from my family.”
Two years later, she was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. Something she frequently talks about on her Instagram page with more than 200,000 followers. Janea said she made the page so others don’t feel alone and to show the world “we are more than a label.”
There’s been a lot of ups and downs in her life. Like the death of one of her best friends and then her beloved dog. The grief was “a lot.” But Janea said leaning on her village, making new friends, and continuing to seek therapy has been critical to her recovery from her suicide attempt.
“There’s been a lot of behaviors that I had to ditch that no longer serve me. Even though they once fulfilled me at a younger age, they kept me safe or they kept me sane,” she said. “Now … I don’t need to keep it in my circle anymore. Being able to learn a different coping mechanism that can help me through those same intense feelings was helpful within my healing journey.”
The research on self-injury and self-harm
Too often research on self harm is grouped in with suicidality. Many clinical databases, public health surveys, and screening tools don’t separate self-harm and suicide. However, there is a clear difference between the two.
Dr. Jill Harkavy-Friedman, senior vice president of research at the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, said people who self harm don’t have the intent to die. If someone harms themselves with the intention to end their life that would be considered a suicide attempt, she explains. Whereas the goal with self harm is to feel relief.
Decades ago, when Whitlock started her research there wasn’t much to build off of, she said. In 2004, she founded the Cornell Research Program on Self-Injury and Recovery, to explore the then nascent phenomenon now known as non-suicidal self-injury. Although research on this topic has increased, it’s still not commensurate with research on suicidality.
Much of the data collected on self-injury rates come from self-reported surveys or in the case of Berkely, hospital discharge data. While more data is useful, Whitlock explains, there’s other underlying reasons people who self-injure don’t seek care.
A lot of people who self-injure and seek care have bad experiences with providers. “Doctors will say, ‘I can’t believe I’m taking up time to stitch you up after you did this to yourself,’” she said. Instead, Whitlock emphasizes to the providers she works with to lead with compassion and not judge.
In the years Janea has sought care, she said, some providers called her “drug-seeking” after trying to get pain medication from her self-inflicted injury. Other therapists were more helpful. She encourages other young Black and Latina girls who are managing self-harm to not let provider comments become a deterrent to healing. Even when life feels heavy, she said, it’s worth it to hold on.
“You can absolutely become better after everything that you’ve dealt with.” she says to young girls like herself. “I’m accepting that these bad things have happened to me, but they don’t make up who I am as a person. I can continue (to) change the trajectory of my life.”
