The Growth of the Self-cutting Phenomenon: Not your average essay

Sarah Lunsford
Wed, 11 Oct 2017 03:51:42 +0000

I turned this paper in for my psych class and made a 100% so I wanted to share and hopefully make a difference.

Self-cutting, vertical for suicide and horizontal for emotional release. You can use anything to do it with. Razors, knives, soda cans, glass, anything that is sharp enough to break skin. More and more people are becoming victims to themselves over this phenomenon but the question you may be asking is why would someone want to cause themselves pain like that? In this paper I will discuss why someone would use it as emotional release, why someone would want to kill themselves this way and why you should give this habit up if you have it.

You just had a really bad day, someone at school called you a whore and pushed you into a locker knocking all your books out of your hands. You get to class and your teacher calls you out on asking a question you should have known the answer to. Your best friend decided she wasn’t your best friend anymore because you are too gloomy, even though she knows you have severe depression. You know you are almost finished with school, your little brother needs you and you know you want to live. You also know you hate feeling this way, you hate, hating yourself and you just want to let everything go. You go to your room and you take out your pencil sharpener and carefully take it apart. You lightly and firmly press the blade to your wrist and cut from left to right watching the little beads of blood come out of your barely broken skin. You take a sigh of relief and fix the pencil sharpener and start your homework. You feel a lot better until tomorrow.

Imagine, you just lost someone you are close to, you are in an abusive relationship, you just got through a divorce or maybe you suffer from a mental illness. At first you may cry and look at yourself in the mirror every morning and tell yourself you are ok. You should be glad to be alive but then as the day goes on everything that happens just seems to be bad luck. You start to hear this little voice saying “maybe the world would be better off without me.” Or “Maybe I would be better off dead.” You get home that night and the world seems dark and full of empty promises, so you get in the bath hoping the water will calm you down so you can be reasonable but the negative thoughts and memories continue to pour through your mind and you see it. You pick up the razor that has cut you many times before and you break it apart. All the sudden it feels like you have no control over your body and you can feel the tears falling down your cheeks as you take the knife and press it to your skin. “Do I want to die? Or do I just want to not feel anymore?” you ask yourself as cut from your wrist to your elbow over and over again until all you see is blood. You feel calm and you feel yourself start to doze off and you tell yourself that it wasn’t deep enough to kill you. It was, you never woke up.

You didn’t mean to cut that deep, or that far. You didn’t mean to kill yourself. It’s too late for I didn’t mean to. Your mom came home and went to check on you in your room, you aren’t there. She cries out for you, checking all the rooms. Finally she opens the bathroom door and screams running over to your limp dead body. She holds you tight crying covering her shirt in blood. She gets the strength to call 911 and she sits there holding your lifeless hand waiting. An ambulance arrives and takes you in a body bag to the county morgue while your mom gives her statement to the police covered in your blood. She is then left with telling your brother and your dad. Calling the school and telling them you won’t be there anymore. Your brother doesn’t understand how you could do this to him. How you could be so selfish because he needed you so much. Your parents just keep blaming themselves and each other wondering if you ever told them how you felt. Your school held an assembly and hung up posters about suicide prevention and your best friend blames herself for years because she teased you. Even the news reacted in a necessary moment posting the suicide hotline all over their website and on the bottom of the TV screen. “If you are feeling hopeless, worthless and like you don’t deserve to live or just don’t want to please call the suicide hotline at: 1-800-273-8255”

This message is important because so many people feel alone, like they have no one to turn to. Factors that tend to cause these feelings are being bullied, depression, change in lifestyle, failing, losing something or someone important. So please, If you or anyone else you know is feeling like they would be better off call or give them this number 1-800-273-8255.