NHS statistics reveal that the number girls under 18 admitted to hospital after self-harm have doubled in the last 20 years – there were 13,463 treated last year, compared to 7,327 in 1997.
Annie Cluley has been a counsellor for 30 years, with most of those visiting her being Christians who want her to include the gospel in their sessions.
She told Premier that a lot of her time is spent on correcting things that her clients have heard at church which haven’t helped:
“I think I’ve had to undo an awful lot of very unhelpful remarks that Christians make and I think what I want is a good pastoral training in every church because I really feel quite strongly that people are so uneducated in this area.
“Christians make a huge amount of mistakes, and people out in the world, and thank God the (government) are spending £300 million on educating in schools – and I think I don’t care where they get good education from about what’s going with self-harm and bullying as long as there’s good input.
“On the whole I would say Christians can be quite un-doing of some of the good works – they just say – ‘Oh, let’s pray about it'”
Cluely explained what other phrases can be unhelpful but are commonly used:
“‘Bring it to foot of the Cross’ or ‘You shouldn’t be doing this, you’re a Christian’, ‘You should know better’…it’s all out of ignorance because they don’t know how to deal with it…
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