Local youth advocates and mental health researchers say a troubling trend is emerging among Southern California teenage girls: rates of self-harm are climbing even as other measures of adolescent mental distress have started to level off since the height of the pandemic.
Jae Janea, now 22, knows the pattern firsthand. Last summer, after four days without speaking to another person, she walked into a dollar store, bought a pack of razor blades, and went home to cut her wrists. She believed she was ready to end her life. Instead, she called her closest friend, who talked her through making a tourniquet and rushed to her side. The next morning, the two went to urgent care together.
“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,” Janea said. “I was trying to find a way to make it stop. But it was absolutely not the appropriate way. I wish I could tell myself differently then.”
Janea had struggled with self-harm for years before that night. Since her attempt, she has rebuilt her life around structure and support — more frequent therapy, better nutrition, regular exercise, and learning to create emotional distance from overwhelming feelings. She still feels the urge to hurt herself at times. But she’s far from alone.
National data show emergency room visits tied to self-harm rose sharply through 2021, and in California those numbers remain higher than pre-pandemic levels even as broader indicators of teen mental distress have declined, according to research from the Public Policy Institute of California. The 2026 State of the Girl Report from Girl Scouts of California found that nearly a quarter of seventh-grade girls reported self-harming.
A recent analysis out of UC Berkeley found a significant increase in multiracial adolescent girls being treated for self-harm injuries at California hospitals. Emily Liu, the study’s lead author, said the overall number of adolescents in the state engaging in self-harm continues to grow. Drawing on inpatient and emergency room discharge records from 2005 through 2021, researchers found more than 70% of those cases involved girls, with the highest rates by 2021 found among multiracial, white and Black girls between 15 and 19 years old.
Youth mental health has been a stated priority under Gov. Gavin Newsom, whose administration backed a 2024 ballot measure that directed billions of dollars toward expanding treatment capacity. In 2022, Newsom also approved a $4.3 billion boost to youth mental health programs as part of the state budget. More recently, the California Department of Public Health rolled out a statewide prevention plan aimed at reducing suicide, self-harm, overdose deaths and behavioral health disparities.
Still, students and school officials say significant gaps remain. Newsom vetoed bills in both 2022 and 2023 that would have further expanded mental health services for young people.
Shalini Mustala, a researcher with the Public Policy Institute of California, told state lawmakers at a recent hearing that rates of depressive symptoms and suicidal thoughts among teens have climbed steadily since 2009, and that hospitalizations for self-harm remain elevated well after the pandemic’s peak.
“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 two decades, cautions that while self-harm is a risk factor for suicide, the two are not the same. Non-suicidal self-injury — often used interchangeably with self-harm — involves repeatedly hurting oneself, typically through cutting, scratching or burning, to relieve intense emotional pain rather than to end one’s life.
Most people who self-harm never end up in an emergency room, Whitlock said. When a student injures themselves at school, protocol often calls for a 911 report treating it as a suicide attempt, even though that’s rarely the intent.
“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.”
A hidden struggle in communities of color
Dawn L. Brown, president and CEO of the Los Angeles-based nonprofit EmpowHer, has spent years supporting teens who self-harm. Her organization partners with Title 1 schools across Los Angeles County, serving roughly 1,000 girls of color from low-income communities each year.
Nationally, about 17% of teens report some form of self-injury, though studies suggest the rate climbs to between 17% and 35% among college students. Brown said many of the girls she works with are grappling with fears of school shootings, threats to their bodily autonomy, immigration concerns and financial insecurity.
The Girl Scouts USA State of the Girl report found that nonbinary students report the highest levels of emotional distress, with 61% describing chronic sadness and more than half of nonbinary ninth-graders reporting 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,” Brown 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.”
Research points to a strong connection between self-injury and trauma. While some studies show modest demographic variation in who self-harms based on ethnicity and income, Whitlock said the differences are not dramatic — and nationally, rates among young girls continue to climb across the board.
“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.”
From hopelessness to healing
Janea describes her childhood as marked by trauma. As a biracial teenager, she often felt she lacked the support she needed. At 12, her life was upended when her father attempted to kill her mother and cousin and tried to kidnap her; he was later sent to prison. Eight months later, at just 13, Janea attempted suicide.
During her stay in a psychiatric hospital, she found it difficult to open up to her therapist, and it was around that time that she began self-harming. Over the following years, she cycled in and out of outpatient psychiatric care as a persistent sense of hopelessness took hold.
At 15, she was sexually assaulted — an experience that, painfully, pushed her toward greater honesty in therapy.
“That caused me to open up too, because that made me feel very uncomfortable with myself,” she 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, Janea was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder — a topic she now discusses openly with her more than 200,000 followers on Instagram. She created the page, she said, so others wouldn’t feel alone and to remind people that “we are more than a label.”
Janea has weathered profound loss since then, including the deaths of a close friend and her beloved dog. But she credits her support network, new friendships and continued therapy with helping her move forward 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.”
A gap in research and care
Much of the existing research on self-harm gets folded into broader studies on suicidality, even though clinicians say the two are distinct. Dr. Jill Harkavy-Friedman, senior vice president of research at the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, explained that people who self-harm are not seeking to die — that would constitute a suicide attempt. Self-harm, by contrast, is typically an attempt to find relief from unbearable emotional pain.
When Whitlock began studying self-injury decades ago, there was little existing research to build on. In 2004, she founded the Cornell Research Program on Self-Injury and Recovery to study what was then a little-understood phenomenon now widely referred to as non-suicidal self-injury. Though the body of research has grown since, it still lags far behind the amount dedicated to suicide.
Much of what is known about self-injury rates comes from self-reported surveys or hospital discharge records, like those used in the UC Berkeley study. But Whitlock notes that many people who self-harm avoid seeking care altogether, often because of how they’ve been treated by medical providers in the past.
“Doctors will say, ‘I can’t believe I’m taking up time to stitch you up after you did this to yourself,'” Whitlock said, describing the kind of judgment that can drive people away from treatment. She urges the providers she trains to lead with compassion instead.
Janea has experienced that judgment herself — she recalls being labeled “drug-seeking” by one provider after asking for pain medication for a self-inflicted wound. Other therapists, she said, were far more supportive. She hopes other young Black and Latina girls facing similar struggles won’t let negative experiences with providers stand in the way of healing.
“You can absolutely become better after everything that you’ve dealt with,” she said. “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.”
Original source: CalMatters
