The Telegraph - Self-harm: why would she cut herself?

By Anna Stone8:22PM BST 02 Oct 2013

The shocking discovery that her smart, lively 15-year-old daughter was self-harming opened Anna Stone’s eyes to the scale of the problems afflicting our troubled teenagers

The news that more than 22,000 children and teenagers were treated in hospital for self-harming last year comes as no surprise to me. When we discovered our 15-year-old daughter was cutting herself, it was a total shock. Her adolescence had, like that of many girls, been a period of increasing turbulence – but self-harming never crossed my mind until Sophie rang up from the other side of London saying that a cut in her foot was hurting too much for her to come home by Tube and could she have a taxi? Yes, of course, we said.