The prevalence of deliberate self-harm and its relationships to trauma and dissociation among Iranian young adults.

This study aims to investigate the prevalence of deliberate self-harm and its relationships to childhood and recent trauma and different patterns of dissociative features. A total of 100 male and 100 female college students were administered a 58-item questionnaire designed to detect the extent of dissociation, deliberate self-harm, and trauma history. Participants with deliberate self-harm behaviors reported more traumatic experiences and dissociative features than participants without such behaviors. Furthermore, the prevalence of deliberate self-harm (i.e., 40.5%) was similar to previous studies on college student populations. However, and contrary to earlier research, deliberate self-harm was significantly more prevalent among men (48%) than women (33%). The findings support the notion that trauma, pathological dissociation, and depersonalization/derealization play important functional roles in self-harm behaviors. From this perspective, it is feasible to understand individuals who engage in self-harm as either escaping from uncomfortable dissociative states or experiencing an infra-psychological conflict in which one dissociative part of the self is being abusive toward another.