(MSNBC) The Tacoma, Wash., mom knew something was up with her 11-year-old daughter when the girl kept leaving school with stomach aches that disappeared as soon as she got home. But she didn’t know how bad things had gotten until the school called one day two years ago to tell her the sixth grader was sobbing and threatening to hurt herself.
“I told the principal ‘I’ll be right there,” says Abby, a 34-year-old special education teacher from Tacoma, Wash., whose last name is being withheld to protect her daughter. “When I got there, they’d already called the paramedics. That’s when she told me, ‘Mom, I’ve been cutting myself.’”
Abby was shocked to learn her daughter had been using the family’s steak knives to deliberately cut herself on half dozen occasions. But, as it turns out, her story isn’t as unusual as we’d like to think.