Lack of Family warmth is the primary reason.

Gregariousness and communicating with others is one of the Basic Instincts of man along with Instincts of

Survival

Thirst

Hunger

Sex.

When clash of instincts takes place, the outlet is provided by Gregariousness.

If the process of sharing Conflict is thwarted,many abnormal behavior is noticed.

Individual craves for attention , not for the act per se, but sends out a message that ‘I am in trouble,I want to share’

Family and friends perform that function.

With skewed up values on Familial System, the problem becomes serious in acts like these.

People need to be brought up in an emotionally secure environment:they need to interact with people;children should play , not with Computer and Gadgets but with children of their Age Group.

More importantly they should have a mooring in some Faith;it could be Atheism as well.

Setting impossible targets for the individual and too much of planning in Life are also contributing factors.

They should be taught that losing is a part of Life and none can get all they desire.

When Canadian researchers plugged the terms “self-injury” and “self-harm” into YouTube‘s search engine, 5,000 videos popped up. They selected the 100 most-viewed videos. Wonder who in the world would watch explicit images of someone hurting herself?

Apparently lots of people. Viewers clicked on the videos in question more than 2 million times and designated them as a “favorite” more than 12,000 times. (More on Time.com: Gallery: Self-Injury in Japan)

Up to a quarter of teens and young adults intentionally hurt themselves by self-cutting or burning; the medical term for such behavior is nonsuicidal self-injury, or NSSI, which refers to intentionally injuring oneself with no intention of committing suicide.

Many of the videos chronicle personal timelines — “I started self-injuring when I was 14,” a video might begin — while others present statistics about NSSI. The information conveyed in the videos was pretty evenly split between the factual or educational and hopeless stories of woe. Nearly all the videos contained images of self-injury; 28% of the videos that featured a person actually included in-action footage. More than half the videos contained no warning about graphic, violent content. (More on Time.com: How to Find the Best Drug Treatment for Teens: A Guide for Parents)

..YouTube contacted the researchers and requested the URLs of the videos they’d studied; the website has since flagged many of the videos for mature content and removed others. But even if all 100 were taken down — and not all 100 were — what about the other 49,900?

Q: Why do people intentionally hurt themselves?

A: People self-injure in order to cope with difficult emotional experiences — lots of sadness, stress, anxiety. Usually self-injury is a marker or sign that something is not going very well for a young person.

Q: How does it help them cope?

A: A lot of people do report it provides temporary relief from negative emotions. But what happens is it becomes repetitive, and it’s used as a negative coping strategy.

Q: Do girls engage in self-injury more than boys?

A: It was previously believed that by far more females self-injured than males. However, more recent research suggests that males self-injure as well, and many studies report no sex differences in rates of self-injury.

Q: It’s called NSSI — non-suicidal self-injury. People who self-injure don’t want to kill themselves?

A: Based on research, we can distinguish self-injury from suicide. It’s about the intent behind the act itself. Many people are adamant this is not about suicide. It’s about dealing or coping with negative emotions.

Q: Are people who self-injure just seeking attention?

A: It’s a myth that it’s about getting attention because many young people don’t want to tell anyone about it.

Q: What might treatment involve?

A: We try to foster more adaptive coping strategies for when those negative emotions arise — different types of distraction techniques, physical exercise or just talking to someone when the urge arises. It’s important to help a young person identify what triggers the urge to self-injure.

http://healthland.time.com/2011/02/23/self-mutilation-videos-on-youtube-may-cause-kids-to-hurt-themselves/#ixzz1FS9qJY2J

http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1809157,00.html

Related:

Self-injury (SI) is any deliberate, non- suicidal behavior that inflicts physical harm on one’s body to relieve emotional distress.

Self-injury does not involve a conscious intent to commit suicide, though many believe that people who harm themselves are suicidal.

People who SI are often trying to:

* Distract emotional pain

* End feelings of numbness

* Calm overwhelming feelings

* Maintaining control

* Self-punish

* Express thoughts that cannot be put into words

* Express feelings for which there are no words

Who engages in self-injury?

There is no simple portrait of a person who intentionally self-injures. This behavior is not limited by gender, race, education, age, sexual orientation, socio-economics, or religion. However, there are some commonly seen factors:

* Self-injury more commonly occurs in adolescent females.

* Many self-injurers have a history of physical, emotional or sexual abuse.

* Many self-injurers have co-existing problems of substance abuse, obsessive-compulsive disorder or eating disorders.

* Self-injures tend to have been raised in families that discouraged expression of anger, and tend to lack skills to express their emotions.

* Self-injurers often lack a good social support network.

What are the types of self-injury?

* Cutting

* Burning

* Picking at skin

* Interfereing with wound healing

* Hitting

* Scratching

* Pinching

* Biting

* Head-banging

Treatment

Self-injury is often misunderstood. Self-injurers trying to seek medical or mental health treatment frequently report being treated badly by emergency room doctors and nurses, counselors, police officers and even mental health professionals.