Cutting has come to YouTube, and that has mental health experts quite worried. Hundreds of videos depicting self-injury are floating around the popular video-sharing site. Most involve folks cutting themselves, but others feature youth burning, biting or even inserting objects underneath their skin. Some incorporate text and music, and they can be quite popular: According to a recent study published by the journal Pediatrics, the most watched cutting videos have been selected as viewers’ “favorites” more than 12,000 times. This is a big issue, according to researchers. “The risk is that these videos normalize self-injury and foster a virtual community for some people in which self-injury is accepted; the message of getting help is not necessarily conveyed,” says Stephen Lewis, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. “There’s another risk, which is the phenomenon of ‘triggering,’ when someone who has a history of self-injury then watches a video or sees a picture, his or her urge to self-injure actually might increase in the moment.” (New York Times)