The Dark Side of Social Media: Enabling Effective Parental Engagement with the Online Communication of Self-Harming Adolescents

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Peers play a major role in teenagers’ lives, and they are very likely to communicate with each other via technology. An overwhelming majority of teenagers report social media usage, and 45% report that they are almost constantly online (Anderson & Jiang, 2018). One topic that teens commonly communicate about online is self-harm . Self-harm is defined as a set of behaviors involving some degree of intentional damage to one’s body, and may include cutting, burning, or bruising (De Riggi, Lewis, & Heath, 2018). Worldwide, self-inflicted injuries constitute the second-leading cause of death for individuals 10 to 24 years old (Patton et al., 2009), but nonfatal self-harm is more frequent than fatal self-harm (Hawton et al., 2012). Many scholars therefore believe that self-harm is a coping mechanism, rather than representing failed suicide attempts or attention-seeking behavior (Messina & Iwasaki, 2011).