Psycho release, everything else just goes away. Made me feel alive again. It felt good.
You keep doing it and doing it. I get really angry because it's like, what have I done to myself? You wait a little bit and then you start asking yourself, why did I do that?
In high schools around Australia, students are deliberately hurting themselves. People are experiencing levels of distress that they don't know how to deal with in any other way. What's at stake is an entire generation of kids who, many of whom are telling us that they're not thriving, that there's something wrong.
That's almost, dare I say, an epidemic. Self-harm for me at the moment is an answer. It does keep me alive and it does keep me able to cope.
I didn't have a choice over it. You just have to. It might be frowned upon by everybody that knows me, but this is what I need and that's what I'm going to do.
Self-harm is the unrecognized threat to the next generation. To find the answer, science is going deep into the workings of our brains and challenging the very nature of modern society. In the past four weeks, have you or your child self-injured?
In 2008, the University of Queensland conducted Australia's first national survey into the dark and secret world of self-harm. How many times or sessions of self-injury did you have over the last four weeks? Hidden behind the phone, a sample of 12,000 people spoke frankly about a practice that had often taken over their lives. Professor Graham Martin has been trying to tell the story ever since. We were blown away by the numbers.
genuinely did not expect to find that 8% of the population had at some stage hurt themselves. That's almost, dare I say, an epidemic. The numbers were frightening.
When applied to the whole population, the survey showed that every month, over 200,000 Australians intentionally damage their own bodies. They cut, scratch, burn and sometimes even break bones. And it's at its peak among teenagers and young adults. Why are so many teenagers doing something so opposed to our natural instinct for self-preservation?
I'm 15 and I started self-harming when I was 11. I'm 17 and I started self-harming when I was 13. I started self-harming when I was about 15. I'm 17 and I started self-harming when I was 12. One of my sisters started it because it was a scene at school. Well, when I started, I was the only one doing it, and now it's everywhere. If self-harm becomes a habit, it can haunt a teenager well into adulthood.
Alison Dower is 22 years old. She began to self-harm seven years ago. The first time that I self-harmed was after an argument with my parents.
There's that much stuff going on in my head, I can't separate any of it. I'm angry with mum, I'm angry with dad, I'm angry with school, I'm angry with everyone. It got really overwhelming and I just thought I need something to focus on. Alison lives alone in Brisbane.
Even after all this time, her self-harm continues to shock her family. She was dead sick. That was her relief, so she just continued. We were at a loss. We just didn't know how to handle that.
I've been told self-harming is a way for people in pain to relieve their pain. For a short time, but I don't think I'll ever understand it. I have not been able to find a satisfactory answer for self-harming. It's just not in my world. For many who self-harm, the world is full of constant, almost unbelievable anxiety.
Often there is only one escape. Things are moving so quickly in your brain that you do feel sick because you just can't focus. It's like say a hundred things running through your head and all of them are making you stressed. And you feel anxious because you've got so many things to do.
I feel like I've got something to say to you. It's quite distressing. Ironically, the emotions that make Alison's life so difficult were designed to help us survive.
We humans have a survival instinct we share with every animal species called the fight or flight response. Inside our brains, a tiny structure called the amygdala reacts the moment we sense danger. Before we can even think, it triggers a series of split-second emotional responses. generating fear and anxiety, so we are ready to fight for our lives or run away.
For people who self-harm, this is the start of their trouble. So this very evolutionarily old stress response still gets recruited in modern situations, so we often respond to socially threatening situations as if we're also under a physical threat. What probably sets people who engage in deliberate self-harm apart is that their emotions are stronger to start with and that they're also not as good at being able to regulate these emotions.
To do that, our brains also have a backup system to keep our emergency response under control. It's our frontotemporal cortex. It's designed to quickly assess the threat that has stimulated the amygdala and if things aren't that bad, calm us down.
The most helpful way of thinking about the frontal cortex is that it is the breaking and control mechanism of our emotional life and that if there are abnormalities that makes it more likely that people will harm themselves. In other words, Alison's emotions are triggering her brain as if her life is being threatened and her frontal cortex is not stepping in to calm her down. One thing that does that is self-harm.
When I'm feeling bad, I think of self-harm straight away and go, yes, that's an option. This is what I need and that's what I'm going to do. So many people who engage in deliberate self-harm look for something like a circuit breaker, something to kind of put a stop to the feelings, and often that thing needs to be very powerful and very extreme in order to change their feelings.
Self-harm is not new. It's been around for decades, as something usually practiced by people suffering the distress of psychiatric illness. But officially, it's only classified as a behavior, a symptom of larger problems, like depression or anxiety. What's new is that teenagers, both male and female, who are not mentally ill, are taking it up.
We define an epidemic as something that occurs above the rate in a population that you would expect it to occur. I think self-injury can be qualified as a silent epidemic, although fortunately maybe not so silent anymore. Why as a society don't our young people have the capacity to deal with emotional pain?
Why are they having to turn to this particular mechanism? Well, the fundamental question is why would people hurt their bodies and why would they find it relieving? And for most people, that's just incomprehensible. For teenagers who know where to look, self-harm is everywhere. Strewn across the internet, it's linked to some of the biggest names in show business.
14 pop icons came out as having experienced or practiced self-injury in some way. And, you know, a lot of them very high profile, like Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp and Princess Diana. In an eerie foreshadowing, Princess Dianaana described how emotional pain triggered her self-harm. The self-harm crisis.
has driven a dedicated group of scientists around the world to take a stand and find out what can be done. The search has gone to some surprising places. At the frontier of neuroscience is the idea that we can use our brains to change our brains. And it could have unique consequences for self-harm.
Anxiety could be replaced by that most elusive thing, happiness. Most of us think that qualities like happiness are just sort of givens, and people differ in these qualities, but there's not much you can do about it. Well, I think that the...
Scientific research really leads to a very different conclusion. Professor Richard Davidson has been scanning the brains of Tibetan monks whose lives have been dominated by the practice of meditation. Their brains emit extraordinarily high levels of activity in the areas associated with focus and attention. It suggests that with constant practice, the brain can train itself.
But how far can the brain's capacity for change be pushed? To find out, Professor Davidson is exploring how meditation develops the neural pathways responsible for happiness. Now, two Melbourne scientists want to see if the same techniques can be used against self-harm.
Professor Nick Allen and Dr. Andrew Channon have designed an experiment... to test the powers of meditation. They hope to change the brain's neural pathways and turn anxiety into happiness. There's been no study that has done this before with people who self-harm.
People have tried the ignore it and hope it'll go away approach and that hasn't led to a reduction in self-harm. So it's time for novel approaches. At Origin, Australia's largest youth mental health research centre.... They'll be looking for answers, and they've invited Alison to help them.
She's travelling to Melbourne so they can compare her brain before and after an intense course of meditation-based therapy. The more that we understand these behaviours and also their consequences, then the more likely there is hope for change. And what happens is with this cap on your head, then the little sensors that are in the cap... measure very tiny voltages that are on the surface of your scalp and it amplifies them up so that we can look at them on the computer and analyse them. The first step is to measure the electrical activity of her brain with an electroencephalogram.
The aim is to assess her frontotemporal cortex, the area that modifies the fight or flight response. The test shows an irregularity that could be driving Alison's self-harm. The right side shows a high level of activity, but the left does not. The left side of these frontal parts of the brain are particularly involved in positive emotions, whereas the right-hand side of the brain seems to be more involved in emotions like disgust, fear and sadness. Alison's EEG shows the reverse of brain activity associated with happiness.
So what's possible is that this particular pattern that Alison's showing means that in her brain those negative emotions are on more of a hair trigger. Anxiety is just compounding and compounding and you feel dizzy and you feel chaos in itself and the inability to stop. It's this pattern the Melbourne team want to break with a meditation course called mindfulness.
This kind of mindfulness training may well actually change the way the brain functions over time. The reason we're interested in that is because there are different patterns of brain activity that is associated with people's emotional functioning. And so one of the things we're going to be interested in is whether there's any signs of this changing after you've been through the course that you're going to do. Okay, sure. Does that make sense?
Back in Brisbane, Alison must be assessed by mindfulness practitioner Alison Kean before she can begin the course. Hey Alison, welcome. In particular, I want to make sure that she's psychologically resilient to handle the program because...
Even though it's called mindfulness-based stress reduction, at times it can be quite stressful as people begin to observe just what goes in and out of their mind. Again, if for any reason I get a sense that you're having some sort of struggle around the work...