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men. The Cornell self- injury program’s literature cites in a recent study that between thirteen and seventeen percent of American high-school students engage in self- injury at least once. The Cornell research also states that “early onset self-injury is common around the age of seven, although it can begin earlier. Most often, however, self-injury behaviors begin in middle adolescence, between the ages of twelve and fifteen, and can last for weeks, months, or years. For many, self-injury is cyclical rather than linear, meaning that it is used for periods of time, stopped, and then resumed. It would be erroneous, however, to assume that self-injury is a fleeting adolescent phenomenon.” If Angelina began self-injuring at the age of thirteen, this puts her in the average age range of adolescent self-injurers.
    In his book, Psychological Self-Help , Dr. Clayton Tucker-Ladd, former director of the Counseling and Testing Center at Southern Illinois University, summarized some of the myriad explanations he had come across while treating adolescent self-injurers:
Young people are sometimes emotionally abused and told they are bad, sinful, selfish, hurtful, hateful, uncaring, crazy, or weird. They may be blamed for their parents’ troubles or divorce, etc. It isn’t surprising they may end up feeling guilty, shame, self-hatred, and wanting to hurt or punish themselves.
    Some have grown up in physically and sexually abusive families (beatings, threats & torture) and were called useless, stupid, ugly, slut, and a total failure; many were bullied by peers; some were raped. Some responded with resentment, intense anger, and repressed rage; others adopted the negative evaluations and felt worthlessness, felt no one could ever care for them, and felt like a piece of trash. Some responded to being hated with a defiant attitude, e.g., “You can’t make me change” or “I deserve to be abused but I can hurt myself more than you can.” Some wanted get back at the abusive person by hurting themselves via self- mutilation, i.e., showing visual signs of their feelings. Some physically responded to pain, punishment, and self-punishment by actually feeling better, something like having an adrenalin rush or taking drugs; others found that burning or cutting themselves numbs them to pain.
    Others were feeling depressed, helpless and hopeless or were without feelings, almost like being dead. Some responded to self- injury while feeling dead with “The self-abuse showed me that I could feel and was alive.” Others felt alone, uncared for, scared, sad, not just neglected but utterly worthless, rejected by family and friends, placed in foster care, dumped by boy/girlfriend, etc., so, it felt better to hurt themselves and, in that way, escape the hurt from others. Many were well aware they had seriously disabling psychological problems and felt weird, unable to cope, scared, helpless, and inferior. Still others felt out of control, couldn’t do anything right, but were reassured by the courage they had when self-cutting, surprised at what injuries they could force themselves to inflict.
    Although in recent years Angelina Jolie has become the poster child for self-injury, she is by no means the first celebrity who has admitted to the practice. Other high-profile practitioners are actress Christina Ricci, Courtney Love, and singer-songwriter Fiona Apple, who admitted to Rolling Stone that she cut herself for years. Apple, as her fans know, was raped outside her mother’s apartment building when she was twelve years old, an incident that has haunted her ever since.
    Like Angelina, Apple has tended to downplay the significance of her self-injuries. “I have a little bit of a problem with that [self-injury],” she said in one interview. “It’s a common thing.” Asked by the interviewer if it made her feel better, she responded, “It just makes you feel .” She is quick to point out, however, that self-injuring doesn’t mean she is