More young women are being admitted to hospital for self-harm than ever before, shocking statistics from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare show.
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The number of women aged between 15 and 24 who have injured themselves so badly they need hospital treatment has increased by more than 50 per cent since 2000.
The increase is part of a small but steady rise in hospitalisations for self-harm among all age groups, which experts are at a loss to explain.
Robert Tait, a senior research fellow at the National Drug Research Institute at Curtin University, said the figures were the tip of the iceberg.
‘‘This is a rigorous examination of how many people end up in hospital, but the problem is much bigger than that,’’ he said.‘‘Most people who self-harm don’t seek help for it."
Orygen Youth Health executive director Patrick McGorry said the figures were worrying, with more than a quarter of young people experiencing mental health problems in a given year.
‘‘Among people presenting to Headspace with mental health problems, I would say about 10 per cent are self-harming, maybe more,’’ he said.
‘‘When there is a lot of emotional pain and not much in the way of coping mechanisms sometimes one of the [maladaptive] ways people find of relieving that severe pain is self-harm."
In the 2010-11 financial year, more than 26,000 people were hospitalised for self-harm, the institute’s report shows. Of those the majority, 42 per cent, were aged between 25 and 44. Nearly one in five were women aged 15-24.
Self-harm and assaults helped drive an overall rise in serious injuries needing hospitalisation, responsible for more than one in 10 cases.
The biggest contributor was an increase in falls, which rose by about 2 per cent each year, mainly among over 65s.
The institute’s James Harrison said overdoses were the form of self-harm most strongly linked to hospital admission.
He said it was not known whether increases in self-harm were linked to greater access to dangerous drugs and other methods, or mental ill-health. In the mid-1960s there was a dramatic increase in suicide that appeared to be linked to the increasing availability of barbiturates.
‘‘The type of drugs available does have a big effect on suicide,’’ he said. He said he was surprised that despite improvements in traffic and pool safety the overall rates of injury were still rising.
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