Nobody knows how many cutters are at large, but psychologists have been conducting surveys and gathering 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 Psychology, 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 routineand secretself-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 unravel and treat the problem. The first step is to understand why kids do this to themselves.
