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Response to self-injurious behaviors in a community sample of young women.

Sir: We would like to comment on the article by Favaro et al. regarding self-injurious behaviors (SIBs) in a community sample of young women. Favaro et al. presented a thorough piece of research with sound methodology and extremely insightful results regarding self-injury and its association to other self-harmful behaviors. However, we were surprised that the authors argued that “the epidemiology of this phenomenon in the general population is unknown.” Several recent studies with community and nonclinical samples, such as college students who self-injure, are available. A cursory search of the literature identified 39 studies that discuss community samples of adolescent and young adults who self-injure. These studies reported rates of SIB varying between 13.9% and 38%. In addition, the claim of Favaro et al. that their study is “the first to investigate––and find––a connection between childhood abuse and compulsive SIB” could be argued to be misleading as research on this topic is present in the existing literature. Given the rapid increase of articles on self-injurious behaviors in the literature, it is understandable how authors can miss some more recent studies. However, we believe that this study would have been more informative and of greater strength and validity had it included most recent available data.