Dear President,

          I am a high school freshman who would like to shift our focus on our youth. One of my main concerns is about the way our country is dealing with self harm and I would appreciate it if our country could take a closer look at it.

        So many teens in high school are self harming and nobody tries to stop it. 90 percent of people who engage in self harm begin during their teens or pre-adolescent years. Nearly 50 percent of those who engage in self injury activities have been sexually abused. Females comprise 60 percent of those who engage in self injurious behavior. Even if we don’t know what a person goes through, we should treat them with respect and how we would want them to treat us. The way we treat others can dictate actions that they will make such as those in the movie “Cyberbully”. In “Cyberbully”, the girl was being bullied by other students in her school; online and off, she would be humiliated. Her mother and her friends tried to help change the way people treated her. At one point, she stopped responding to the people that were bothering her but when the problems became too much, people stopped helping her. Instead of feeling alone and trying to face everything on her own, she relied on trying to overdose on pills. She took things too far but for her that wasn’t the case. People tend to believe that self harm is the only way to avoid pain but in reality it really isn’t. So many cases like this happen everyday and go unnoticed by so many people.

       Therefore, people should treat others with as much respect as they possibly can because sometimes people may think: What would happen if one day I took it too far,If someone walked in and just found my body lying there LIFELESS and in COLD BLOOD, I’d be a murderer not of someone else but of myself, It’d really be over then, I wouldn’t be able to feel a single thing. According to Daily Mail’s article “One in 12 teenagers self-harm”,”One in twelve teenagers self-harm, and statistics are even worse for girls, a study has found. Ten percent of girls admitted to self-harming, compared to six percent of boys.Of those who self harm, a tenth continue to inflict injuries on themselves in young adulthood. Psychiatrists, from King's College London, took part in the long-term research which monitored a group of young people from Victoria, Australia, from 1992 to 2008. At the start of the study, the average age of the 1,802 participants was 15”. Basically this means that females are more likely to self harm due to them handling things worse than males do. Females tend to take things to the heart more times than less and it starts to eat away at them. Even though this occurs, it doesn’t mean we can turn our back on the males out there that need help too. The point is that we need to help decrease the levels of self harm all over the nation for males and females.There are so many contributing factors to self harm such as: abuse (sexual,physical,and verbal), problems at home, depression, low self-esteem, bullying/discrimination, and so much more. If we lessen the factors, there is a chance that self harm rates could decrease.These are reasons why the prevention of self harm is very important. Overall, my question for you is: What can you do to help prevent self harm?

I appreciate you taking the time to read my letter of interest.

Respectfully,

Destiny