Structural Patterns of Relationships of Depression, Emotional Breakdown, and Experience of Violence with Self-Harm Behaviors in Women: The Mediating Role of Social Skills, Emotion Control, and Body dissatisfaction

Self-harm is one of the pervasive social and individual factors that has attracted the attention of mental health professionals. Studies have shown that the experience of violence is one of the important precursors in the formation of self-harming behaviors. Emotional failure and depression have also been shown to be effective in creating and sustaining self-harm. Past research has identified other factors associated with self-harm, such as social skills, emotion control, and body dissatisfaction. The aim of this study was to design and test a model of the effects of self-harming behaviors.

The research method was descriptive-correlational and the proposed model was evaluated by modeling structural equations using SPSS26 and AMOS24 software. Intermediary relationship analysis was used using the bootstrap method in MACRO Preacher and Hayes (2008). The statistical population of the study was all women aged 15-25 years in Karaj in 1399 that 500 people were selected by purposive sampling. To measure the research variables, from the Self-Injury Scale (Sigalas and Biswas, 1998), Beck Depression (Beck, Mendelssohn, Mook & Arbaf, 1996), Love Trauma (Dehghani et al., 2010), Social Skills (Inderbitzen And Foster ،1992), emotion control (Roger & Nashvar, 1987), violence against women (Hajyahy, 2001) and body image (Fisher, 1970) were used. The results showed that the proposed model fits well (RMSEA <0.1) and CMIN / DF >0.5).

The results showed that depression, emotional failure and experience of violence are good predictors of self-harming behaviors. Findings in the second part showed that difficulty in controlling emotion, social skills and body dissatisfaction play a mediating role in the model.

These results indicate the impact of cultural factors, context and social skills are of particular importance and it is necessary to provide comprehensive care including assessment of individual-family and social factors. In the treatment of women with self-harming behaviors Pay special attention to emotional, social, and emotional differences and characteristics.