Teen self-harm ยท Ages 13 to 17
Teen self-harm treatment in Colorado, for the day after you found out.
Outpatient care for ages 13 to 17 in Boulder and Thornton. Self-harm is more common than most parents are ever told, it is treatable, and it is not a verdict on your parenting. The first call is an assessment, not a commitment.
If this is happening right now
Before anything else on this page.
If your teen is in danger right now, stop reading and make one of these two calls.
Call or text 988. That reaches 988 Colorado, the state mental health line, free and confidential, 24 hours a day. A counselor will ask whether your teen is safe, then listen and stay with you. You can call about your teen rather than only for yourself. Here is exactly what happens when you do.
Call 911 if your teen is in immediate physical danger, or if an injury needs emergency care tonight.
The Redpoint Center is an outpatient center, not a crisis line. We cannot be the call you make at two in the morning. Once the immediate danger has passed we can take the care from there, and the rest of this page is about that.
What self-harm is
It is not attention seeking, and it is not a suicide attempt.
Self-harm, which clinicians call non-suicidal self-injury, means deliberately hurting your own body without intending to die. In teenagers it usually looks like cutting, burning, scratching or hitting, and it is usually hidden.
It is far more common than most parents are ever told. Pooling 38 studies covering more than 266,000 young people aged 10 to 19, a 2024 review in JAMA Network Open put the global rate at 17.6 percent, and at 21.3 percent among girls. Roughly one teenager in six. Yours is not the only family on your street.
Teens who self-harm describe it as something that works, which is the hardest part for a parent to hear. It cuts through overwhelming feeling, or it breaks through numbness, or it turns something invisible into something they can see and tend. The relief is real and it is brief. Then the feeling comes back, usually with shame stacked on top, and the thing that produced relief last time is what the brain reaches for next. That loop is why self-harm is so hard to stop alone, and interrupting it is what treatment is for.
What you might be seeing
The signs, including the ones that look like nothing.
Most of these have an ordinary explanation and your teen will have one ready. What matters is several together, and a pattern that holds. If your teen is talking about suicide or is unsafe right now, call or text 988 before anything else.
Unexplained cuts, burns, bruises or scars
Often on the forearms, thighs or stomach, and usually explained away as the cat, a fall, or sport.
Long sleeves and pants in warm weather
Covering up in July, refusing to swim, changing clothes only behind a locked door.
Sharp objects kept for no clear reason
A blade, a shard, a lighter or a knife turning up in a bag, a drawer or a pocket.
Pulling away from friends and what they used to love
Dropping the team, the band, the group chat. Far longer alone behind a closed door.
Talking about being worthless or beyond help
Saying they are a burden, that nothing will change, that everyone would be better off.
Being flattened by ordinary setbacks
A grade, an unanswered text or a small correction lands like a catastrophe and takes hours to come back from.
Why it happens
Self-harm is a symptom, and the symptom has a cause.
Nobody self-harms for no reason. The behavior is doing a job, and treatment works by finding out what job, then giving your teen something better that does the same work.
The vulnerabilities behind it are consistent enough to name. Trauma or abuse. Questions about identity or sexuality, often carried alone. Perfectionism, and a running commentary of self-criticism a parent rarely hears out loud. Real difficulty putting feelings into words, so the body says it instead. Exposure to self-harm through friends or online. And conflict or instability at home, which includes the ordinary kind, not only the severe kind.
Reading that list, most parents find themselves somewhere in it. That is not the same as having caused this. Risk factors describe where self-harm tends to appear. They do not assign blame for it.
One thing here should be said plainly. Self-harm is not a suicide attempt, and treating every instance as one will cost you your teen's trust fast. But it is not unrelated either, and self-harm is among the strongest predictors there is of a later suicide attempt. Both are true at once. That is why the answer is neither panic nor waiting to see, and why the first thing our assessment covers is safety.
Co-occurring conditions
What is usually in the picture too.
Self-harm travels with other things. The assessment looks for all of them, because treating the self-injury and missing what sits underneath it does not hold.
Trauma
Past abuse or a frightening event the body is still carrying, often never disclosed.
Disordered eating
Restriction, purging or bingeing running alongside the self-injury, often on the same driver.
Substance use
Alcohol or drugs doing the same numbing job, sometimes in the same evening.
Learn moreEmotion that arrives faster than they can hold
Feelings that hit harder and quicker than a teenager can manage, which is precisely what DBT is built for.
How treatment works
Safety first, then the reason underneath.
Nothing gets planned before your teen is assessed, and safety is the first thing we look at rather than the last. The assessment covers how long this has been going on, what else is running alongside it, whether there are thoughts of suicide, and what is happening at home and at school. If there is risk, it is addressed in the room that day rather than filed for a later session.
The main treatment is dialectical behavior therapy, and that is not a house preference. DBT was built for exactly this problem, and a systematic review and meta-analysis of twenty-one studies covering 1,673 adolescents found it reduced both self-harm and suicidal thinking, with small to moderate effects measured against control groups. Its four skill sets are the ones this problem actually needs. Distress tolerance, for getting through the twenty minutes when an urge peaks. Emotion regulation. Interpersonal effectiveness. And mindfulness.
Around it sits cognitive behavioral therapy, trauma-informed care where there is trauma to treat, and family therapy, because the home has to change alongside the teen. Every teen also leaves with a written safety plan: their own triggers named, their own early warning signs, what they will do instead, and who they will tell.
All of our teen programs run for ages 13 to 17. If the person you are worried about has turned 18, our adult intensive outpatient program works out of the same offices.
Two levels of care
Where a teen who is self-harming usually starts.
The part that is yours
What parents actually do, starting tonight.
You are not a bystander to this, and you are not the therapist either. These are the things that help, and the first two matter before treatment even starts.
Respond flat, not loud
Stay calm and curious when you find out. Shock, anger and tears all teach a teen to hide it better next time.
Reduce what is within reach
Quietly limit access to blades, lighters and medication. It does not solve the feeling, but it puts time between the urge and the act, and time is what everything else depends on.
Come to the family sessions
The home has to change alongside the teen. Family therapy is where the patterns feeding this get named and worked, and it is part of the program.
Use the parent support group
We run one. An hour with people in the same position does something for the feeling that your family is the only one that no clinician can do.
Know the safety plan
Your teen writes one. You should know what is in it, what they agreed to do instead, and who they said they would tell.
Help build the replacements
Grounding and mindfulness, art or music, movement, writing it down, and people to sit with. The point is a toolkit your teen will actually reach for.
Before you call
The questions parents actually ask.
If I tell you my teen is self-harming, will they be taken away or put on a hold?
Should I search my teen's room?
My teen made me promise not to tell anyone. What do I do?
Is this just a phase, or attention seeking?
What if my teen refuses to come?
Do you treat self-harm and something else at the same time?
What if we need more than a weekly appointment but this is not an emergency?
You do not have to know what to say yet.
Call and describe what you found. We will tell you what we are hearing, whether this needs us or somewhere else, and what a first appointment involves. Assessments are for ages 13 to 17, in Boulder and Thornton.