Playing with knives

Health: As many as 2 million Americans are turning their inner pain into external wounds | Rachel Houston

Kelly Campbell was having a hard week. The 19-year-old had recently transferred to Liberty University and her classes were going poorly. She received a poor grade on a paper.

After committing to baking a cake for a friend's birthday party, the oven she planned to use wasn't available. When she met the other girls who were planning the party, one shouted at her, "Your only job was to find an oven and you couldn't even do that! Big help you are, how are we going to have a party without a cake?"

Miss Campbell apologized and pretended the comment hadn't hurt her. But she excused herself, drove back to her dorm room, and pulled out an Xacto knife. Soon, blood began flowing from cuts she made in her arm. She was not suicidal, though: She was deliberately injuring herself, as do perhaps 2 million Americans, according to Community Mental Health Journal and The Nation's Voice on Mental Illness. Self-injury, according to The American Journal of Psychiatry, is "the commission of deliberate harm to one's own body . . . and the injury is severe enough for tissue damage (such as scarring) to result."