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Jeff Crilley sits down with Lori Vann, an international behavioral health speaker who has spent 26 years specializing in non-suicidal self-injury. Lori explains that self-injury is far more common than most people realize, and takes at least 37 different forms beyond the stereotypical cutting that gets media attention....
Show Notes
Self-injury is far more common than most people realize. Yet many therapists were never formally trained to address it in school.
Jeff Crilley talks with Lori Vann, an international behavioral health speaker and founder of the Institute for Non-Suicidal Self Injury, who has spent 26 years working with clients of all ages who self-harm. Lori has authored four books on the subject, trained school districts and treatment facilities, and appeared alongside Dr. Phil to discuss the link between social media and self-injury in teens.
In this episode:
- Why self-injury is not a suicide attempt, and why asking about intent matters
- The 37 forms of self-injury most people never think about—hitting, biting, and beyond
- How social media's instant feedback loop fuels self-harm among young people
- The dangers of using AI chatbots as a substitute for human counselors, including active lawsuits tied to AI-validated suicides
- Lori's books, coaching services, and free resources for caregivers
- Why self-injury is not a suicide attempt, and why asking about intent matters
- The 37 forms of self-injury most people never think about—hitting, biting, and beyond
- How social media's instant feedback loop fuels self-harm among young people
- The dangers of using AI chatbots as a substitute for human counselors, including active lawsuits tied to AI-validated suicides
- Lori's books, coaching services, and free resources for caregivers
Learn more at lorivann.com
Creators and Guests
What is The Jeff Crilley Show?
Jeff Crilley is a former news reporter, who spent more than 25 years in newsrooms across the country. He’s an Emmy Award winning journalist, who decided to make the jump from news in 2008, when he founded his own PR Firm, Real News Public Relations.
Today, the firm has more than 100 clients, and Jeff continues to tell the stories of interesting people he meets along the way.
These are those stories.
Next on The Jeff Crilley Show, we're gonna be talking to the great Lori Vann. She is a international expert on self harm. It doesn't get the media attention it deserves. Her incredible story just ahead. Television Network. We started slowly growing the company, and we now have over a 100 clients. And we've branched into the world of live digital broadcast. Broadcasting. I now own eight different TV studios and have a huge team, and the stories that I now get to share are sometimes the most important of my life. Life has a funny way of coming around full circle. This is The Jeff Crilley Show. Alright. Self harm has been around for generations. Many parents will know this as somebody who is a teen, maybe just just nicking their wrists a little bit. That's the most common one, the one that makes the news sometimes. Lori Vann is in the studio. She's an international behavioral health speaker and media expert and my friend. Thanks for coming back on the show. Well, thank you. I know. You never ate. You were on my show some five or six years ago and it's it's a delight to have you back. I'm bringing you back to talk about a very serious subject, how did you get involved in self harm? Well, it's been about twenty six years really, that it started when I was an intern way back in the day And I had one teenager that came in, and they didn't cover this in graduate school. They still don't really cover this in graduate school. And then one teen became two, and then I transitioned to working at Green Oaks Hospital on the adult unit, and I had adults engaging in it, and just kept collecting this information, doing more and more research, and eventually I was asked to present on it and give talks, and started to do media interviews with it and then 2014 I said, you know, there's such a need, it's time to write the first of the four books that I've written on the topic. Which is amazing, we're gonna talk about your books in a minute. Let's talk about the psychology, why do teens self harm? There are so many different reasons that people engage in injuries, so the thing I like to emphasize is one, there's over 30 different reasons why people engage in it, and each episode has to be treated differently, because maybe one time they were angry, another time they felt guilty, another time they were sad. And then there are times where they might have had multiple feelings all wrapped up in it, and now we're looking at a perfect storm of it wasn't one singular trigger, it was a really perfect storm that built up until that final little cherry on top. So, the image I keep seeing in my mind is, we've all seen this on the internet, like just little teeny nicks on somebody's arm, they're not trying to kill themselves. No, self injury is not suicide and I really like to emphasize that, that while there is over sixty five percent correlation of those that engage in self injury having suicidal ideation, and that's where suicide prevention starts, with self injury identification and intervention and prevention techniques, but it's not a suicide attempt and everyone needs to ask the intent, not assume behind it. Yes. And as a note, there's 37 different forms of self injury I've tallied, so it's so much more than just cuts. We're gonna pull up your website and as we scroll down the website, tell me what an ideal client looks like for you, you mentioned it's all ages not just teenagers, when they come to you are they confessing to you that I'm self harming? It varies. So, sometimes the parent will bring in the tween or teenager and say, Hey, I know my child is doing this, it was reported at school. And sometimes they will fess up too, and sometimes they don't, and sometimes, because I assess for it with every single client, I never assume someone's not done it because statistically speaking, it's an epidemic. Lifetime risk in The US is probably conservatively thirty percent. Wow. It's more common than autism. It's more common than childhood cancer. It's just so heavily stigmatized that people have a history of it but they're scared to disclose it for these stigma and I have adults that have come in and we will be talking about other things and there's certain things that I just pick up on and again, I always assess for no matter who the client is, I never assume and we'll start talking about examples and they go, well actually now that you mention it, I did used to do that, or Well, I do this behavior, but I've never thought of it in terms of self injury because it wasn't the stereotypical form of it, but maybe they're hitting themselves, or maybe they're literally biting their own lip or tongue or cheeks or they're doing other things that's like, yeah, the intent is there, that is actually self injury. Is it a form of control like I know often people with Anorexia, I can control this, I can control whether I eat Is or this somehow of a, is it soothing to them? It is a self soothing mechanism. It is a coping skill, obviously not a great coping skill, but it is one, and you know the caution I have is on some of the judgments that well we don't judge people that use substances, and we don't judge people that struggle with disordered eating, so why are we so judgmental on self injury? Is it because the scars are on the outside versus internally? And one of the reasons people do engage in self injury is the control part. It's the sense of everyone else is calling the shots. I feel like I don't have control in my life, but what I do to my own body, I have control over that. And that does parallel some of the reasons for disordered eating. And in my second book, The Practitioner's Guide to the Treatment of Self Injury, there's at least five things that eating disorders and self injury have in common. Lori did an amazing interview with Doctor. Phil a few years ago. Let's go ahead and roll that clip. I mean, really, look at Instagram and YouTube. The stuff people put on there. I mean, they're opening a can of dog food, and it's on Instagram. Really? And and so what happens is they look at how many likes they got. And if they don't have a lot of likes, they get anxious and they feel rejected. So they're they're measuring their self worth as a function of how well they're playing on social media platforms. And before, they weren't getting such instantaneous feedback. And people right now, it's like all of a sudden, everybody's paper is graded every day instantly. That wasn't wasn't happening before. Yes. And then now they're getting instantaneous feedback, oftentimes it's not positive. And when it is positive, artificial high. And then when it's not, they They really down, and they get frustrated. They don't know how to cope with it, and they don't know how to change it. So we see cutting behavior, and we see things like that. And when I talk to them and I drill down with it, I find out that they're getting cyber bullied. They're rejected on the Internet. They're feeling like they just don't have validation from their peers that they felt like they had. Probably They wouldn't have had it in the fifties or sixties either. They just didn't know it. Yes. And now they get this instantaneous feedback. And I'm seeing more and more teens coming on the show, and we would get 10,000 letters a day, and then it is riddled with exactly what I'm telling you right now. That is such a good question. I'm so glad you asked that. Thank you. I would like to talk to you about that some more. I would love to speak with you about that. Well, it doesn't get much better than that, does it? Yeah. Give some context to that. Well, it was an event that was in Los Angeles, California and it was my business coach helped facilitate it. I'm very grateful to JT for that, and it was a room of 2,000 individuals from literally all over the world. I think 60 plus different countries were present and was so grateful for the opportunity to spread awareness about this behavior to an international audience. Yes. Let's go back, you've written several best selling books, one of them is A Caregiver's Guide to Self Injury, let's go ahead and put that on the screen. Tell us about that book. It is the first of the four books that I wrote on non suicidal self injury and when I wrote it, it was geared for when someone needs it, they're gonna be in crisis, and they need to be able to go to that chapter in that moment and get the answers that they need. So it's layperson, it's not a lot of technical jargon, it's here are the most common questions I've been asked whenever I do keynote speeches or other presentations, I took those questions and I put them into that book, plus just mistakes I would hear other counselors making, and things to be on the lookout for and things that my clients had reported to me that they wish that people understood about why they did the behavior and putting that all together and it was just, it was a labor of love and I say it's like the self injury 101 because as I said previously counselors don't get training in this in graduate school. I encourage counselors, I encourage nurses, This isn't being addressed properly in medical schools, anyone that has contact with clients or patients, it really I do think is a very helpful book for them plus any caregiver. We were talking before the show about AI and while AI can be a blessing, it also tells you what you want to hear, and so there are some problems with AI. Will you share that? Oh, gracious. Yes. So, as with all technology, I think blessing and a curse, and the concerns I have with AI is just what you said, is that it wants to validate what you say unless you know specifically how to tell it not to, but most people don't. And we have at least two court cases right now or lawsuits of individuals that ended up taking their lives because AI validated that that was something that they should do. Wow. And one of them, I believe, was an adolescent and one was an adult male. And I know that we're gonna have tons of other cases like that. I know a lot of people have started to go to AI for counseling instead of going to an actual human being, and I do believe that that's a very dangerous thing to do because, again, it's going to validate. It's going to tell you what you want to hear. If you're perturbed at your spouse just a little bit because they didn't take out the trash, well let's say, well you should just get rid of that bum. I mean, that's the concern Not that we to mention if we're talking about dealing with disordered eating, it's like, well yes, maybe you are a little bit overweight and you should just go ahead and try to lose a few more pounds, because AI does not have context for who the human being is, and the AI is not looking at you real time. So as a mental health practitioner, that's my really huge concern with it. Lori, we're gonna pull up your Facebook photo gallery and as we scroll down it, I know you do a lot of keynote speaking breakout sessions, but people can also hire you. Yes. Talk about ways people can engage you. Well, there's the counseling piece of it and then there's also the coaching side of it. So in the state of Texas, I can only do counseling with people in Texas. However, I offer coaching services for self injury that are national or international. And it's a little bit different format. There are certain things we can't address in coaching that we do in counseling, but that's my way of trying to serve as many people as possible. Can also hire me for workshops, or if it's a treatment facility or school district, I have been hired numerous times to help train their team in how to better identify and respond to this so that we do decrease the risk of self injury going into suicide. Yes. Lori, we've got about a minute left, so look into the camera on the left and maybe talk to caregiver who has recognized this in their son or daughter. It's treatable, and I know it's a scary thing. I know that there's no book that prepared you for this. You're not alone. There are so many people that find themselves in your position, but there really is help, there is hope. This is a behavior that can be successfully treated, and the Institute for Non Suicidal Self Injury that I founded has a lot of free and low cost resources, and then I would be glad to serve you in a coaching or counseling capacity to help guide you through this process, in addition to just the other resources, books, or there's Instagram and TikTok, Institute for NSSI that has additional free resources, and the YouTube channel has a dedicated playlist that addresses just self injury. Lori, thank you so much for sharing your heart and your wisdom and addressing this very, very serious issue. We're gonna end with her website, which is lorivann.com, the great Lori Vann. Thanks for coming on the show. Thank you. You bet. That's it for now. We'll see you next time.