［Time］Often it’s the one teens inflict¹ on themselves. Why are so many American kids secretly self-mutilating?

     Vanessa’s arms no longer show the damage she once did to them. That’s saying something, given that the damage was considerable. The college freshman², 19, started with just a few scratches from a sharp piece of plastic. Later came the razor blades and then the kitchen knives. After a time, she took to wearing bracelets³ to cover her injuries; when that wasn’t enough, she began cutting less conspicuous⁴ parts of her body. "I was very creative," she says, with a smile.

     Vanessa needn’t be so clever anymore. In the past 18 months, she has cut herself only once. She was pleased and surprised to find that she didn’t enjoy it a bit.

     For most people--and especially most parents--the idea that anyone would tolerate the sting of a razor blade or the cut of a knife, much less enjoy it, is unthinkable. But maybe they are just not paying attention. Vanessa is not a member of some remote fringe of the emotionally disabled but part of a growing population of boys and girls for whom cutting, burning or otherwise self-injuring is becoming a common--if mystifying--way of managing emotional pain.

       Nobody knows how many cutters are at large, but psychologists have been conducting surveys and gathering⁵ data from clinics, hospitals and private practices, and they are shocked by what they are finding. According to one study in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology⁶, from 14% to 39% of adolescents engage in self-mutilative behavior. That range is suspiciously broad, and other estimates have put the figure at just 6% or below. But with more than 70 million American kids out there, that’s still an awful lot of routine--and secret--self-mutilation. "Every clinician says it’s increasing," reports psychologist Michael Hollander, a director at Two Brattle Center in Cambridge, Mass., an outpatient clinic that treats cutters. "I’ve been practicing for 30 years, and I think it’s gone up dramatically."

       The good news is that even as the population of cutters grows, so does the legion of professionals working on new ways to unravel⁷ and treat the problem. The first step is to understand why kids do this to themselves.