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Latoya had no intention of harming her boyfriend when she reached for the kitchen knife while in the throes of an argument with him four days ago.

Instead, she calmly dragged the serrated edge across the fleshy underside of her left forearm, as she has done for years when the stress of the moment becomes too much for her to bear.

Then she did it again, and again, until the skin broke and blood bubbled to the surface.

"Whenever I'm upset or in pain, instead of taking it out on other people I take it out on myself," said the 23-year-old from Toronto, whose scarred and bruised arm betrayed a decade of self-abuse.

Deliberate self-injury without suicidal intent is not a new trend. But new research suggests the practice may be more common among young people than previously believed.

According to a study published in the August issue of the journal Psychological Medicine, 46 per cent of U.S. high school students surveyed had practised some form of self-mutilation in the past year, ranging from cutting and burning to pulling out hair and hitting themselves.

"If this is the case, it's essentially a wake-up call to take better notice of these behaviours in the community and learn how to help teens manage stress without harming themselves," said Elizabeth Lloyd-Richardson, a professor of psychiatry at Brown University in Providence, R.I., and the author of the study.

The findings are a stark departure from other studies on self-mutilation, which have generally pointed to an incidence of between 13 and 25 per cent of adolescents. Leading researchers, however, have not always agreed on what constitutes self-injurious behaviour, in some cases limiting their studies to cutting and burning.

In the Brown study, 633 teenagers between grades 9 and 12 at U.S. high schools were asked if they had engaged in one or more of 11 different types of behaviours deemed by researchers to be self-injurious in the past year.

They included obvious forms of self-mutilation like cutting, burning, inserting objects under the skin and biting, and less overt forms like pulling out hair, picking at skin until blood is drawn and giving oneself a tattoo. Cutting, biting, burning and hitting were found to be the most prevalent forms of self-abuse.

Elizabeth Thom, who runs a counselling service in London, Ont., called Safe Abuse Finally Ends in Canada, said she was not surprised by the latest results.

She said she has seen an explosion in self-injury among adolescents, and estimates that 80 per cent of her clients are teenagers, compared with 50 per cent a couple of years ago.

"I'm seeing kids now in grades 7 and 8," Ms. Thom said. "They feel [this behaviour] gets rid of their problems for the moment. It's not healthy or helpful, but it takes away the pain by distracting them. That may last only minutes, but under the circumstances minutes may be all they need."

Indeed, among the most common reasons for self-mutilation given by those polled were "to stop bad feelings," "to get control of a situation" and "to try to get a reaction from someone."

It was once thought that self-injury was confined to teenagers with severe mental and emotional problems, but the new research mirrors other studies in suggesting that even adolescents who appear mentally stable are harming themselves as a means of coping with anxiety.

"Certainly you still see very disturbed kids who self-harm, but then there are kids who just kind of do it when they're upset," said Miriam Kaufman, an adolescent health specialist at Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children. "I've had a few kids who just cut recreationally."

Ms. Kaufman said the results "seem a little high," but pointed to differing definitions of self-harm. She estimated that as many as a quarter of her patients claim to have harmed themselves in the past year.

"It's become a sort of group activity for some kids," she said. "They get a real rush from it."

Why the practice is growing now is unclear. Some experts point to websites glorifying self-injury. At the same time, there are many sites and message boards dedicated to self-mutilators seeking help.

In the case of Latoya, who asked that her last name not be used because of the sensitivity of the subject, she said she began cutting herself when she was 13 as a way of dealing with the death of her father. Over time it has become routine, she said.

"There's really nothing going through my mind when I'm doing it. I'm just zoned out," said Latoya, who covered her scars with a heavy long-sleeved velour sweater.

"I want to stop. It's disgusting to look at. I can't show my arms when it's hot outside," she said. "When I have a short-sleeve shirt on, people give me dirty looks."