Cutting

The sight of blood never bothered Lucy McKay. Not even her own blood. In fact, she routinely sliced her forearms and thighs just to see it. "As strange as it sounds, it soothed me," she explains. But one afternoon last May, Lucy had a run-in with the red stuff that changed her life. "Blood was literally pouring from a cut I'd just made on my inner arm. It was still gushing after 10 minutes. I realized that if I didn't call an ambulance, I would die."

The incident left Lucy, now a 19-year-old art history student at a New York City university, with 12 stitches. It also scared her into seeking psychiatric help -- even though she purposely made the two-inch wound that landed her in the emergency room. Suicide wasn't and has never been Lucy's goal. Her self-inflicted wounds were her way of coping with tension, fear, frustration, anger, or any other unpleasant emotion she couldn't express -- in this case, the hurt of being dumped by her boyfriend.

Lucy's not alone in her self-inflicted affliction. Armando Favazza, Ph.D., a professor of psychiatry at the University of Missouri in Columbia, believes about 2 million people have deliberately hurt themselves at some point in their lives.

Although it sounds shocking, self-abuse is not new. "Monks flagellating themselves for sinning, women mourning in third-world countries by beating themselves with straps -- this stuff has been going on for centuries," Favazza says. What's more, some of the most famous people in the world have deliberately hurt themselves. Razor blades and penknives were Princess Diana's self-injury instruments of choice, claims writer Andrew Morton in his 1992 biography Diana: Her True Story. In an interview with Details magazine, Johnny Depp admitted that the scars on his forearm were self-inflicted. And Roseanne opened up about self-mutilation in her 1994 biography, My Lives.

Favazza, who authored a book on the subject called Bodies Under Siege, calls self-harm a relief mechanism, "a purposeful, albeit morbid, act of self-help." Attempting to feel better, self-mutilators begin by engaging in deeds as mild-mannered as fingernail-chewing or overzealous zit-popping, then advance to more injurious activities: digging their fingernails into their skin; aggressively picking at sores; biting, cutting, or burning themselves; banging their heads and body parts against walls or with hammers; pulling their hair out; or even breaking their own bones.

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