An alarming number of Canadian women have landed themselves in the hospital for cases of self harm last year, approximately 30% more hospitalizations were recorded than that of their male counterpart according to an analysis by The Canadian Institute of Health Information.
The data indicated that of the 19, 476 reported cases of self injury in Canada from 2015-2016, hospitals saw and treated 11,730 women and 7,746 men.
https://infogram.com/self-harm-hospitalizations-by-gender-in-canada-2015-2016-1g43mnq7wv16mzy
The Canadian Institute of Health Information defines “self harm” as any act of purposely self-inflicted poisoning, injury and suicide both attempted and completed however they note that in this particular analysis “this indicator cannot distinguish whether or not the self-injury was intended to result in death (self-harming or suicidal behaviour)”.
This isn’t the first time that number of women hospitalized for self-harm has outweighed the number of men.
A study in 2008 by the Victoria Healthy Youth survey had similar findings, claiming that “sex was the only significant predictor of non-suicidal self harm with females being at a higher risk than males” and cases of self harm “tend to be most prevalent in those between the ages of 14 and 24”.
According to a study by the CIHI in 2014 on intentional self harm among youth in Canada, 5% of the general adult population and 15% of youth have self harmed with girls aged 14-17 being hospitalized 4x more than boys for cases of self-inflicted injury.
Dr. Elisabeth Melsom, a psychologist from Saterra psycholopgical and counselling services agrees, stating that self harm behaviours tend to develop from unhealthy methods of coping with particularly difficult or unpleasant situations and that boys and girls use different methods to cope.
“Those who self harm often attack their bodies as a cry for help and as a sign of psychological disturbance,” she says. “They may cut themselves, burn themselves, bruise themselves and often times girls are more likely to carry out these behaviors than boys who are more private about these feelings.”
Catherine Horvath, founder and executive director at the Ottawa Centre for Resilience, says that there are many factors that could contribute to this conclusion.
According to Horvath, while the report by the CIHI does not account for age, age itself plays a major factor in the outcome of the data and depending on the age group in question and that with youth in particular “primary reason for hospitalization period is accidents”, and included in “self-harm” is both accidents and intentionally inflicted self harm.
The CIHI clarifies that in this particular report “capturing intention is difficult” and that the indicator (self-harm) “might provide biased estimates of the true number of hospitalizations for self-injury, due to the manner in which intent is captured in the data sources available, poisoning can be coded as “unintentional”—an overdose—or “undetermined”—reflecting an uncertainty between unintentional and intentional motives”.
She says that it is important to note that while there is no way of determining whether or not the hospitalizations recorded in the CIHI study for “self injury” were accidents or not but its “safe to assume that at least a percentage of them were for intentional self-inflicted harm or a suicide attempt.”
“We know that males are more likely to make successful attempts in suicide or self harm,” she says. “Another piece is think has to be take into consideration is that females are more likely to present themselves to the hospital and men are not, these are all important factors that could potentially contribute to the higher number of women’s than men’s cases recorded.”