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Welcome!

Welcome to the Cornell Research Program on Self-Injurious Behavior in Adolescents and Young Adults website. This site is intended to summarize our work and to provide links and resources for information of value in understanding, detecting, treating, and preventing self-injurious behavior (SIB) in adolescents and young adults.

Our research program has two primary goals: a) to conduct cutting edge research on self-injurious behavior (also called non-suicidal self-injury) and b) to translate research findings from our and other  studies into usable knowledge for parents, youth-serving professionals, individuals with self-injury experience, medical professionals, and others. Our work is also intended to explore the relationship of self-injury to other mental health conditions (suicide and eating disorders, for example) and to shed light on contextual conditions that increase and reduce the likelihood that young people will engage in self-injurious behaviors.

Janis Whitlock is now blogging for Psychology Today.  Her latest column is Why Teens Addict: The Elusive Search for Happiness.  A complete archive of all posts is also available.

We invite you to learn more about our work. Please feel free to contact us if you would like additional information, information about our education and consulting services, or want to participate in our study activities.  The CRPSIB team provides a range of consulting services for youth-serving professionals, school personnel, and medical professionals seeking to understand, intervene, and/or treat self-injury in adolescent and young adult populations.  Please contact Janis Whitlock (jlw43@cornell.edu) for additional information.

Would you like to join our listserv? Send an email to crpsib-l-request@cornell.edu The body of the message should simply be "join". Be sure to send your "join" message from the email address where you want to receive CRPSIB updates.

Resources: Factsheets

Our team has developed a variety of factsheets designed to translate

"I cut myself for two reasons. To feel something and to commit violence that didn't hurt anyone else. Like many young people who don't 'fit' in the average American high school, I swung back and forth between a numbness that I still find scary, and an all-consuming rage at the life I had. At the same time, unlike the Columbine boys, who I had more in common with than I care to think about, I never wanted to hurt anyone else…since I hated myself for not being 'normal', I made an excellent target….One of the things I liked about it was how it continued to burn and ache, like a reminder that I was still there, a klaxon telling me I hadn't actually ceased to exist."
    - Message Board Post

self-injury research into practical tools.  The factsheets below focus on addressing myths and misconceptions, coping, and basic background information of value to anyone with personal or professional interest self-injury.  The current topics include:

Resources: Therapy Presentations

In addition to the factsheets listed above, the research team has developed web-based presentations to introduce several therapies commonly used to treat self-injury:

Additional materials, designed for a more academic audience, have also been developed. These include:

For additional resources and helpful links please see the RESOURCES section of our website.

About the artwork on this website: The artwork and symbolic figures shown on this website are taken from Buddhist and Native American representations of healing and wholeness. The mandalas on the welcome page were developed by a class of young people studying Tibetan Buddism. The artists are anonymous.