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 multiple components and is aimed at establishing the prevalence of SIB in non-clinical samples of young adults and adolescents and applying developmental, public health, and social contagion frameworks to understand the behavior and its causes. Our work is also intended to explore the relationship of SIB 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.
We invite you to learn more about our work. Please feel free to contact us if you want additional information or want to participate in our study activities.
Research Opportunity at Columbia University:
Treatment for Self-Injury Study seeking participants
Colleen Jacobson, Ph.D
Clinical Psychologist, Research Fellow, Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Columbia University, New York State Psychiatric Institute in New York, NY. Dr. Jacobson and her colleagues are addressing the epidemiological aspects of self-injury, in addition to developing assessments of and treatment for self-injury. We are currently seeking participants, aged 12 to 18 years, for a treatment study for teens who are depressed and engaging in self-injury. Study participation includes a diagnostic evaluation and those who are eligible receive 12 weeks of individual psychotherapy, aimed at reducing depressive symptoms and reducing self-injury (and urges to self-injure), free of charge. Must be in the New York area. Parental permission for those under 18 is required.
If you are interested in obtaining further information, please call Colleen at (212)543-5931.
Do you have a message of recovery or learning that comes from your experience with self-injury that you would like to share?
Whether you’re someone who has personally experienced self-injury or you’re a friend or parent of someone who has self-injured, we would like to hear about the meaning you have taken from this experience and what you would like others to most know about it. What have you learned about yourself in your process of recovery, or through helping someone else deal with self-injury?
We’re looking to expand the resources we offer, and would like to include personal stories of recovery and healing as well as truths about the challenges and rewards of being the friend or parent of someone who has self-injured as part of this.
Please send your story to Amanda Purington at recovery@crpsib.com. Please limit your writing to about 500 words or less and keep in mind that all submissions are published at the editor’s discretion and subject to editing or excerpting. We are also interested in poems, drawings and paintings (as represented by digital pictures), or other artwork. (Again, all pieces should focus on your story of recovery, what you’ve learned during about yourself during this process, or your experience of helping another.) We will place the stories, art, and poetry you share on our website for a period of time and then place them into an e-accessible archive. Postings will be listed as anonymous or first name only. By submitting a story you are granting permission for the story to be published on a publicly accessible web site.
Also, if you have come across resources – books, websites, factsheets, etc. – that you have found to be helpful, please send along this information so that we can review them and expand the list of resources we suggest to others. Please send this information to Amanda Purington at recovery@crpsib.com.
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.