On this page, you will find information about different celebrities who have self-injured in the past. The purpose of this page is not to glamorize self-injury or promote this behavior, but to educate readers about self-injury further. The stories you're about to read show that people from all walks of life, even celebrities, experience rough periods and deal with these times in different ways. The following material was acquired from Famous Self-Injurers, found at www.self-injury.net/doyousi/famous.htm.
Fiona Apple, famous singer/songwriter, was raped outside of her apartment at the age of twelve. As a result of this, paranoia set in, and she would check her closets to make sure no one was hiding in the house. Fiona was nervous around older men and had terrible, violent dreams. She then developed an eating disorder. Today, Fiona is frustrated with the misunderstanding of her eating disorder. She says, "I definitely had an eating disorder. What was really frustrating for me was that everyone thought I was anorexic, and I wasn't. I was really depressed and self-loathing. For me, it wasn't about being thin, it was about getting rid of the bait attached to my body. A lot of it came from the self-loathing that came from being raped at the point of developing my voluptuousness. I just thought that if you had a body and if you had anything on you that would be grabbed, it would be grabbed. So I did purposely get rid of it." As a result of her eating disorder, Fiona became extremely thin, but was written off by the media as trying to "fit in."
When Fiona read her first bad review, she began scratching her left wrist with the fingernails of her right hand. She scratched all the way up her arm; there are still some dark patches on her wrists, where she dug the deepest. Fiona says, "I have a little bit of a problem with that. It's a common thing." When asked if it makes her feel better, she simply replies, "It just makes you feel." Fiona also bites her lips as hard as she can until they bleed. "And it'll be bleeding, and I can't stop, because it almost feels so good when I bite my lip." Trying to explain her actions, Fiona says, "It was never, like, 'I am going to hurt myself and put myself in the hospital'... It is that I am going to give myself the pain that I need to feel to put the punctuation on this shit that's going inside."
Fiona is upset by how the public reacted to her revelations of her self-injury. She says, "The most annoying thing for me to hear about myself is that I'm trying to make people have a pity party for me. Everything that I've gone through has been dramatized by the people who've written about it, not by me. I'm just saying, 'This happened to me, this happened to a lot of people.' Why should I hide shit? Why does that give people a bad opinion of me? It's a reality. A lot of people do it. Courtney Love pulled me aside at a party and showed me her marks."
Drew Barrymore was born in Los Angeles in 1975, her parents part of the famous Barrymore family. Great grandfather Maurice Barrymore, grandfather John and father John Drew, were actors who spent all their money on alcohol and women. Drew says, "They were all out of their minds. I love that they lived hard and passionately. Maybe the chaos and craziness goes with all that passion, you know? It makes perfect sense about how I am." Drew was three years when she first met her father; he threw her against a wall in an alcoholic rage. Drew talks about her father, saying, "I really love him. I hated him while I was growing up. He was an abusive asshole. But now that I've grown up, I do love him. For a crazy person, he's the most intelligent, fascinating man I've ever met, but he is crazy. Omigod, he's insane!"
Drew was eleven months old when she starred in her first commercial, one for puppy food. At age seven, she became a hit because of her role in E.T. Her life began to go downhill soon after. Drew first got drunk at age nine, smoked marijuana at age ten, and snorted cocaine at age twelve. She tried to commit suicide at age thirteen by slashing her wrists with a butcher knife. After that all-time low, she entered rehab, not for the first time, but this stay was successful. To celebrate her triumph over drugs, Drew emancipated herself from her parents' control at age fifteen. A year later, she published her autobiography, Little Girl Lost. Drew began starring in sexually-loaded films and modeled for Guess? jeans. Slowly, she began showing herself to be a great actress and has become a famous star.
Drew Barrymore explains how she looks at herself, saying, "I know I'm not ugly, but I don't think I'm a pretty girl. I'm very critical of myself, definitely. There's one thing about my body that I truly, truly hate. I hate my arms! I have really fat arms! They're like sacks! I always really wanted those long, lanky, thin, model-like arms, but I don't have them. There's nothing I can do about it." She admits that she occasionally has periods of depression. "I used to get into wallowing depressions that would last for months. So, like, fucking Camille-esque, you know? Now they're very sporadic."
Angelina Jolie, a young actress, was born in 1975 to famous parents, both actors. She grew up in Los Angeles and studied at the Lee Strasberg Insitute. Angelina appeared in five student films for James Haven Voight, her filmmaker brother, as well as in music videos for the Rolling Stones, Meat Loaf, the Lemonheads, and Lenny Kravitz. Jolie had a short modeling career with Finesse Modeling Agency; she appeared in numerous fashion layouts. In 1996, Angelina married Jonny Lee Miller, a British actor, while wearing a white shirt with her fiance's name written on it in her blood.
Angelina hurt herself often in the past. She explains, "You're young, you're crazy, you're in bed and you've got knives. So shit happens." She talks about her past self-injury, saying, "This person asked me about cutting myself when they saw a scar. I'm very open, but because of that, people think that they know everything about me, and, actually, they don't know anything. I say things that other people might go through. That's what artists should do - throw things out there and not be perfect and not have answers for anything and see if people understand. But this person made the cutting sound interesting, like it was something I do now." For the record, Angelina did cut, but doesn't now, and doesn't endorse it. "And then I met somebody who said they'd seen movies of mine and then showed me where they had cut themselves. I had to explain, first off, not to do that. But it made me really fucking angry at the people who represent me in a way that would get that person to do that and show me. I don't understand why people would want to use something so damaging. It's like, let's make me look 'cool' and worry a lot of people in my family." Angelina has the Japanese symbol for 'death' tattooed on her shoulder and the Latin words, 'Quod me nutrit me destruit,' on her stomach, meaning "What nourishes me also destroys me."
Courtney Love, outspoken and often times controversial singer and actress, was born in San Francisco in 1965. Her parents, who lived a hippie lifestyle, divorced when Courtney was very young. As a child, Courtney was diagnosed as being autistic and went to therapy for several years. She went wild during her teenage years; Courtney had many conflicts with teachers, was expelled from school, and was arrested for shoplifting. At age sixteen, she dropped out of high school completely. Courtney formed her band, Hole, in 1989 with her friend Eric Erlandsen. Courtney's husband, Kurt Cobain, killed himself in 1994, and she was accused of "murdering" him by angry Hole fans and fans of Kurt's band, Nirvana.
Courtney went through a period of self-injury; she would cut herself while she was dancing and whenever she was "working through an emotional trauma." While talking about Kurt's constant overdoses, she says, "Some people OD. I've never ODed, ever. I've gotten really fucking blasto, but instead of ODing, I chatter and start talking too much, screaming and running around naked and getting hysterical, cutting my arms, you know, crazy shit. Breaking windows. But I never have fallen on the floor blue."
"I have many bones, and I've broken a bunch. I think self-destructiveness is given a really bad rap. I think that self-destructiveness can also mean self-reflection, can mean poetic sensibility, it can mean empathy, it can mean a hedonism and a libertarianism and a lack of judgment."
Diana, Princess of Wales, was born on July 1, 1961 to the Viscount and Viscountess of Althorp. Diana's parents divorced when she was six; her mother left her father for another man. During the rest of Diana's childhood, she was shuttled back and forth between two households. At age fourteen, Diana described herself as hopeless and a poor student.
Diana began purging the night before her marriage to Prince Charles, discovering that her fiancé was in love with another woman. During her marriage, she felt no control over her life; it was a repeat of the pain and betrayal of her childhood.
In a 1995 BBC television interview, Diana revealed to the world that she was a self-injurer. She said that she had cut her arms and legs, explaining, "You have so much pain inside yourself that you try and hurt yourself on the outside because you want help." Diana: Her True Story, a biography written about the princess, said that Diana had thrown herself into a glass cabinet at Kensington palace at various times, slashed her wrists with a razor, and cut herself with the serrated edge of a lemon slicer. Once, during a heated argument with Prince Charles, Diana picked up a penknife and cut her chest and thighs. Her husband still scorned her, and thought she was faking her problems, dismissing her behavior as melodramatic and purely attention-seeking. During a fight on an airplane, Diana locked herself in the bathroom, cut her arms, and smeared the blood over the cabin walls and seats. Another time, she threw herself down the stairs.
Diana died on August 31, 1997, in an automobile accident with her boyfriend, Dodi Fayed, while trying to evade the paparazzi. She was a courageous women who gave further prominence to the problem of self-injury.
Christina Ricci, an actress since childhood, was born in Santa Monica, California to a lawyer-psychiatrist father and real estate agent mother in 1980. She was discovered at the age of seven and, a year later, made her screen debut in Mermaids (1990); she was cast as Cher's daughter. Christina proved to be a talented adult actress in The Ice Storm, playing the role of a sexually precocious fourteen-year-old. Ricci, a compulsive talker and smoker, is known for her outspokenness on a large number of controversial topics.
In an US magazine interview, Christina explains a small, smile-shaped scar on her hand. "I was trying to impress Gaby [Hoffmann, her best friend]. So I heated up a lighter and pressed it on my hand." She reveals other burn scars on her arms and says, "I wanted to see if I can handle pain. It's sort of an experiment to see if I can handle pain." In another interview, Christina revealed that she sometimes puts cigarettes out on her arms. When asked if it hurts, she replied, "No. You get this endorphin rush. You can actually faint from pain. It takes a second, a little sting, and then it's like you really don't feel anything. It's calming actually." In a Rolling Stone interview, Christina explains where each scar came from. When she was angry about "not looking very good," she pressed a hot lighter to her hand to impress some boys. Scratches on her forearms come from fingernails and soda tops. She explains, "It's like having a drink. But it's quicker. You know how your brain shuts down from pain? The pain would be so bad, it would force my body to slow down, and I wouldn't be as anxious. It made me calm." Christina also suffered from anorexia at one point in her teenage years. She says, "In a way, I was trying to get rid of my breasts. Everyone my age wanted them, so it was like, whoo-ooo. Then I started hating them. And for all of my movies, I was supposed to be younger, so I'd have to strap them down."
Today, looking back at her self-injury, Christina says, "when I was younger, I did self-mutilate. I'd be upset, so I'd do it, and it would calm me down. It's a horrible way to feel better. But there are two parts of your brain-- one really wants to destroy the other. And sometimes the idea of self-destruction is very romantic. I got over that."
UPDATE: Don't miss Christina's performance as Elizabeth Wurtzel in the film adaptation of Wurtzel's Prozac Nation. More details can be found at the Internet Movie Database.
You might be wondering why the celebrities listed here are all females. Well, the sad truth is that most self-injurers are female. In fact, if you take a look at the results of my poll, you'll find that the percentages of female and male visitors is always at about 90% female and 10% male. Of course, any good researcher would know there are a variety of confounding variables where any poll is concerned, but I believe 90-10 is a fairly good estimate of the makeup of the self-injurious population.
When The Cut Goes In Deep originally posted on 03-05-2000 and
reposted after remodeling on 06-22-2000.
Ronnie 2000-2004 ©
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