Symptom specificity of adolescents with self-injurious behavior

As an introductory part of the paper, authors give a short overview of existing results in the literature related to self-injurious behaviour and adolescents' deliberate self-harm. In their own random sample study, authors organized a self-report screen (provincial town, 3 educational facilities, 470 pupils aged between 14 and 18 years) by means of the translated version of Ottawa Self Injury Inventory (OSI) used widely in community-based studies in Canada. The Beck Depression Inventory was introduced to measure the key symptoms of depression among youngsters. 26 youngsters were found to have had at least one self-injurious action in their life-time. The authors describe the characteristics of these subjects on the basis of symptom occurrence statistics. Although the depressive symptoms have an expected correlation with the self-injurious ideas, depression does not seem to have the same relationships with the actual self-harm action. The authors attempt to give an explanation of this contradiction.