New Report!

Please see our latest report, titled Connectedness and suicide prevention in college settings: Directions and implications for practice, which notes that "connectedness" offers a valuable tool for understanding trajectories leading to risk and resilience in individual lives and for informing interventions.  The paper provides "a definition of connectedness and four core components of a connectedness framework, closing with intervention implications for suicide prevention on college campuses."  To access the full report, please click here. 

Recent Publication

Please see our recent publication, available from the Journal of Adolescent Health. The article, titled Nonsuicidal Self-Injury as a Gateway to Suicide in Young Adults, concludes that nonsuicidal self-injury may serve as a "gateway" behavior for suicide for some young adults, and this could be because it reduces inhibition to self-harm through habituation to self-injury. For more information, please see the full abstract and article information.

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 project is intended to generate new research and insight into self-injury as well as to translate the growing body of knowledge about self-injury into resources and tools useful for those seeking to better understand and treat it.

Watch a short interview with Janis Whitlock, to hear why studying self-injury is so important.

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 for general use based on current self-injury research. Current topics include:

• What is self-injury?
• Therapy: Myths and misconceptions
• Therapy: What to expect
• Recovering from self-injury
• Top misconceptions about self-injury
• General information on coping
• Alternative coping strategies
• Information about self-injury for parents
• Information about self-injury for friends

Resources: Recovery and Therapy Presentations

In addition to the factsheets listed above, the research team has developed a web-based presentation about the recovery process and others that introduce several therapies commonly used to treat self-injury:

• Recovering from self-injurious behavior
• Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
• Dialectical Behavioral Therapy
• Mindfulness-Based Therapies

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

• An annotated bibliography of academic literature regarding coping
• A review of academic literature regarding coping
• The open source journal article on basic self-injury facts is written especially for clinical providers and interested others.

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

Please also see our interview with filmmaker Wendy Schneider, creator of the film "CUT: Teens and Self Injury."