| Abstract [eng] |
The World Health Organisation describes self-harm as „when somebody injures or harms themselves to cope with or express extreme emotional distress and internal turmoil“ and about 17,8 proc. of adolescents have self-harmed at least once in their lifetime. The risk of suicide for people who self-harm is 49 times bigger than the general population. The problem of suicide is well known in Lithuania - Eurostat data shows, that Lithuania is the leader in Europe by the number of suicide cases and in the year 2021 12 children killed themselves. Aim of the study. Examine, whether the features of self-harm of psychiatric ward patients in Lithuanian hospitals correlate to those described in scientific literature across the world in the manners of sex, social status, family matters, alcohol consumption and psychiatric diagnosis. Methodology. The literature review was conducted using key words “self-harm in hospitalised/hospitalized children”. The time frame of publishing for selected works was 2012-2022, and the used scientific databases were “PubMed”, “Cohrane”, “BMJ journals: BMJ mental health”, “The Lancet”. The data of paediatric psychiatric ward patients was collected using anamnestic reports of patients of Republican Vilnius Psychiatric hospital, registering the information using the statistics program “Excel” and computing the information using the “SPSS” programe. Results. The median of age of patients who self-harmed was 15. Patient self-harm had a statistically significant correlation to patient sex. The spread of patient self-harm between villagers and city folk was not statistically significant. Alcoholism in patient’s families, parental neglect, physical parentalabuse of child all had a statistically significant correlation with patient self-harm. Self-harming behaviours were most common among patients diagnosed with adult personality or behavioural disorders, affect disorders and schizophrenic, schizotypal and delusional disorders. Conclusions. Self-harm is prevalent amongst teenagers and has close ties to suicide attempts, but due to social stigma it is often hidden from physicians. Because of this reason identifying specific self-harm risk factors allows doctors to more accurately monitor patient groups who are in risk for self-harming behaviour. In this study it was discovered that self-ham was more common among girls, the median of age of self-harming patients was 15. There was also a correlation between psychiatric diagnoses and self-harming behaviours – it was more common or patients with a diagnosis of affective disorder, behavioural or personality disorder or schizophrenic disorder. |
