A 16-year-old girl took the ACT yesterday and today led an open-mic session at the Geneva Public Library to promote her organization, A Cutter’s Guardian Angel, aimed at providing peer-to-peer support for teenagers who are at risk of inflicting self-injury due to psycho-social issues, the Chicago Tribune reports.
While making readers aware that this is a real problem among adolescent girls, the Tribune’s article focuses on the fact that teenagers aren’t qualified to provide psychological counseling to other teens about problems as serious as their tendency to cut themselves.
But that misses the point, which is peer-to-peer support for teenage girls who are panicking, need someone to talk with, and have a tendency to injure themselves.
“We disclose very clearly that we are not therapists; we are teenagers; and we shouldn’t be treated as therapists,” the article quotes Bree Carey, the teen who started the online peer-support community, as saying. That’s the point, and the Tribune needed to focus readers’ attention there. From Bree’s mission:
[ACGA is] made to help teens and their families learn to deal with mental illness in positive and effective ways. We provide individual and group services to help teens learn to deal with mental illness [in themselves] or [in someone] close to them. We offer advice and strategies on communicating one’s needs to the adults in his/her life and basic evaluations to determine what the next steps should be.
We also take part in attempting to break the stigma of mental illness. Suicide, depression, self-injury, eating disorders—all of these are taboo in our culture today. ACGA works as a group to make these issues known and tell teens that it is OK to deal with them.
We are not doctors or therapists; we are simply a group of teens who teach from experience. Our services are meant to be used along with, not in place of, therapy.
Most of this behavior falls into the domain of non-suicidal self-injury, or NSSI. According to the best research we can find, peers can influence each other in both adaptive and maladaptive ways when it comes to NSSI. Girls who have a best friend who engaged in NSSI behaviors are more likely to injure themselves, research out of Harvard, Brown, and the University of North Carolina tells us. They’re also more likely to attempt suicide later in their lives.
So while teens may not be able to offer advice, they do have a direct influence on what happens with other teens. Instead of giving advice, Bree and her small group tend to prepare other teens so they are more willing to seek help.
“We encourage them to seek help, but frequently, at the moment where they truly [intend to injure themselves], they will not want to seek help,” the Tribune quoted her as saying. “We get them to a level where they are willing to seek help.”
That’s precisely where peers, not professionals, are needed. Professionals wait in their offices for the phone to ring; peers are with other teens on a daily basis. Both needs are strong, and they’re different; they’re fulfilled by different people.
NSSI research is notoriously lacking
The precise processes by which peers can influence NSSI aren’t well understood, but peers’ strong influence has been well documented. And an online community is one of the best ways to act as a peer, a teenager, for the sake of another. Besides, all the research cited above shows a higher incidence of NSSI among girls who are less connected socially, and engaging in social media with healthy peers can help.
Self-directed violence occurs more and more in the online space, according to an article in the June 2014 edition of the peer-reviewed journal Computers in Human Behavior. “While some forms of online violence are limited to Internet-based interactions, others are directly related to face-to-face acts of violence,” wrote Desmond Patton of the University of Michigan School of Social Work, et al.
Putting these two studies together, then, it’s clear that online communities, led by peers, can be effective in helping teens deal with psychological taboos like those Bree described.
Looking forward, continuing peer groups
What concerns me most about A Cutter’s Guardian Angel is not that teens might confuse Bree with a professional therapist: kids know the difference.
No, what concerns me is that these four caring and dedicated angels won’t be teenagers forever, and this organization, like so many good ones started by teens, will fade away as soon as these girls aren’t seen as “peers” anymore.
Bree is, from all accounts, a brave girl to move past her own struggles with self-injury, and her presence in the lives of other teenagers, especially in the online community she has established, will be a godsend to quite a few girls, I’m sure. But if this online peer-support community is worth doing, then it’s worth planning for it to continue well into the future.
