What the hell is going on with American girls?

[Rev. Rye]

The study is limited to the US, but I don't know that the rise in self harm is limited only to the US. That's why I asked for some non US in put.

Page 1 is the abstract for the letter/study. 

I have to question the political angle also. Why would 10 to 18 year old girls care about politics? None that I knew did. The 19 to 24's barely did. 

Could this all be about body image thanks to Hollywood, media and advertising? Is it only the ones who believe they don't physically conform that self harm? If it is, that is very sad.

Guess we won't know until somebody tracks the reasons.

Honestly, I gave my hypothesis because I get the impression that the crazy shit that's going on is getting all over the news might be getting to some girls (maybe giving some too much credit), and perhaps I may have extrapolated the fact that college girls have been getting even more politically conscious and more acutely aware about how society is jacked against them because they were born with aesthetically pleasing genitalia into younger years. That said, I don't have much in the way of contact with pre-18 girls (I went to a boy's high school, don't have much interest in socialising with underaged girls for obvious reasons, and the most involved question I've ever bothered to ask one [in my capacity as cashier at a candy store] is "You want the Razz-Apple Fun Dip or the Cherry?"). I do remember once looking at a female coworker's Facebook account, which seemed to be more active when she was in high school, but given that half of it involved her macking on her female friends and the other half involved them playing with their rubber duckys (sic), I doubt that would be much help in explaining this problem.

Like I said, it's a hypothesis and perhaps not a good one at that, and since you wanted an answer about what could have triggered a rise in self-mutilation in American girls since 2008, and seemed to discount CL's social media hypothesis (something I suspect is still a far bigger factor than politics), I figured that the bizarre worst-aspects-of-the-sixties-mixed-with-the-last-years-of-Weimar social malaise that's been infesting our culture in the past couple years could be spilling into the youth, perhaps due to being affected by boys who see the impunity that we give the worst aspects of ourselves and embrace it, Bryce, for those of us who've seen 13 Reasons Why.

Seriously, given the parameters: America-specific, post-2008, and neither social media nor the increasingly toxic climate are adequate answers, I honestly feel very limited in the sort of answers I can give.