Mental health is important for the life of every human being, mental health affects all aspects of life, with a healthy mentality the mood and mood will be stable and our response to ourselves and others will also have a positive impact. Mental health can be affected by life events and events that have a significant impact on one's personality and behavior. These events may include domestic violence, child abuse, and long-term severe stress. When mental health is compromised, mental illness and mental disease occur. Mental disorders can change a person's behavior, coping with stress, interacting with others, making decisions, and even lead to self-harm (Rifani & Rahadi, 2021). Self-harm behavior is a form of action taken by someone to overcome painful feelings or emotional distress in a self-defeating way such as hurting and injuring themselves without the desire to die (Tarigan & Apsari, 2022).
Self harm is very widespread today among adolescents and adults, especially in women, often people learn and take self harm lightly even though this is something that cannot be allowed because if this is allowed to happen it can trigger more severe impacts such as suicide. A YouGov Omnibus survey in 2019 showed that 36.9% of Indonesians have intentionally self-harmed. Other research shows from school survey data that around 13% to 25% of adolescents have committed self-harm (Rini, 2022). In addition, according to the 2013 Indonesian Violence Against Children Survey, the prevalence of adolescents aged 13-17 years who self-harmed as a result of violence was 13% of adolescent girls in the category who experienced physical violence (Wibisono & Gunatirin, 2018).
Based on the data above, it shows that the phenomenon of self-harm generally occurs among adolescents, especially adolescent girls, which is caused by physical and emotional violence by parents and their closest family (Wibisono & Gunatirin, 2018). However, it does not rule out the possibility that self-harm can also occur among male adolescents. Based on research conducted by (Rini, 2022) shows that there are several behaviors that are often carried out by women including cutting themselves, banging their heads against walls / hard objects, grabbing hair, biting body parts, burning the skin, stabbing themselves with sharp objects, scratching body parts. Meanwhile, the behavior of hitting oneself is done more by men than women.
Self-harm can be caused by various factors, including emotion focus coping, meaning that an adolescent tends to solve problems by minimizing the emotional pressure felt in order to get a sense of comfort or relief, one of which is by committing self-harm (Tarigan & Apsari, 2022). Then, (Islamy & Ratna, 2023) stated that the desire to self-harm was carried out as an outlet for feelings of failure, disappointment in others, and lack of communication with parents themselves feeling unheard. In addition, according to (Wibisono & Gunatirin, 2018) the invalidation factor from parents on children can also be the cause of their self-injurious behavior. According to (Bidayah et al., 2022) that the cause of self-harming behavior is psychological factors, such as feeling unable to withstand emotions, stress, low self-esteem, depression or despair. According to (Farwah, 2019) bullying and cyberbullying are unique predictors of self-harm and suicidal behavior.
The negative impact of self-harm behavior felt by sufferers is that it causes physical wounds to the body and causes various conflicts with the closest people. Meanwhile, the positive impact felt is to relieve emotional pressure and the emergence of a feeling of relief in the sufferer (Zakaria & Theresa, 2020).
Thus it can be concluded that self-injurious behavior tends to occur in adolescent girls compared to boys due to various factors behind this. Self-injurious behavior cannot be underestimated because it can be one of the main causes of suicide in adolescents. The role and support of parents and loved ones can be a major factor in overcoming self-injurious behavior.
