In the rare chance that you’ve been completely avoiding news platforms and social media the last few days, you may not know that Zayn Malik has left beloved boy band One Direction and subsequently devastated teenage fans across the globe. When the undeniably calamitous announcement broke, One Direction’s devotees expressed their grief online on sites such as Tumblr, Facebook and Instagram. However, the emotional text outbursts and crying selfies quickly turned into an expression of anguish in a far more ominous manner — self-harm.
As the hashtag #Cut4Zayn started trending on Twitter, pictures and videos of young girls cutting themselves, carving Zayn’s name into their forearms with razors and encouraging others to do the same began to circulate. One girl wrote, “The faster you cut your wrists, the faster Zayn comes back.” Others followed suit. This collective lunacy over the actions of a pop star don’t just speak to our society’s worship of celebrities, but also to the alarming subculture steadily growing on social media which encourages self-harm and mutilation, glamorizing it and treating it as an exclusive club rather than a serious mental issue.
Although it is not just young girls that self-harm, they are twice as likely to do so as their young male counterparts. In England, one in five 15-year-olds have hurt themselves deliberately, a figure which has tripled since 2005. Self-mutilation is an epidemic that is only strengthened by the countless blogs and accounts made to encourage young adults to inflict pain on themselves as a sort of mental escape. A simple Google search automatically brings up various sites that depict arms and legs slashed across with deep cuts accompanied by tips on the most effective ways to cut, scratch, bruise or burn the body.
The availability of these grotesque images to just about anyone in addition to the vast number of teens applauding one another for their illness is only further promoting this sort of harm. A study by Cardiff University found that young adults were using social media to share photos of self harm and many even used these photos to prompt their own episode of self harm. Psychologists found that young people will use images of self harm as a trigger or a high in order to give themselves the push to cut and model what they’ve just seen.
It should come as no surprise that social media is so influential in this aspect, but there is one positive aspect. With enough pressure, enough constructive counteraction in the forms of blogs and Instagrams and enough young people speaking out against the access of these sinister accounts, we will be able to remove this sick encouragement from the lives of young adults struggling with self harm.