The statistics were revealed at the one-day ‘Choose Life’ conference in the West Park Centre that aimed to raise awareness of issues of self-harm and suicide and look at good practice.

The event, funded by Dundee City Council’s Choose Life fund through the Scottish Executive was organised by Women’s Rape and Sexual Abuse Centre, The Corner, the Web Project and The Samaritans.

It follows figures released last week by the General Register Office for Scotland which showed 66 people died in Tayside in 2004 as a result of intentional self-harm, assault and undetermined death.

There were 657 adults admitted to A&E at Ninewells as a result of self-harm over a six-month period. Only 67% of these were referred to liaison psychiatry service for assessment and help.

The ratio between males and females seen by the A&E department in Dundee is consistent with the rest of the country, with 60% males and 39% females. The missing 1% is due to a discrepancy in data.

That one third of self-harm patients were not seen by the specialist service is concerning for clinical nurse Scott Kane, of the liaison psychiatry unit with NHS Tayside.

He said, “The approach to self-harm has a good degree of success. There are three different outcomes. Some people have stopped self-harming, some have reduced the amount they self-harm and for another group it has made no difference and they continue to self-harm.

“The number of patients that self-harm presented to accident and emergency at Ninewells over a six month period is 657, which is about 100 per month and 441 (67.1%) of these people are referred to the liaison service. More worrying for us is that more than one-third of those seen by A&E were not seen by us.

“This could be down to a number of reasons. Some people discharged themselves against medical advice.

“Some people were not prepared to wait due to a delay in accessing the duty psychotherapy doctor and some people were not deemed severe enough to warrant psycho assessment.

“Someone may have superficially overdosed on 12 valium pills and that would make them sleepy, but it would be good to get that individual person’s understanding of what that would have done to them.”

Poisoning was the preferred choice, with 91% of these people using this method of self-harm. Cutting and other means were seen less regularly.

Mr Kane said this may be due to the fact that people who choose to cut themselves fail to visit A&E because they believe they will not receive the required support.

The majority of these people are seen in the middle of the night and it is often alcohol related, but evidence shows that it is as frequent during the week as at weekends.

More than half of these patients have a history of self-harming.

The picture worsens with almost 150 youngsters self-harming from as young as six-years-old.

Lynette Bastianelli of the child and family psychiatry department with NHS Tayside is one of two nurses that have been operating the service for young people under the age of 18 who are still at school and who self-harm that are referred from A&E and doctors throughout Tayside.

The service dealt with 148 referrals in 2004, 122 of those were girls and 26 were boys.

There were 67 from Dundee, 41 from Perth, 39 from Angus, and one from Fife who was referred from Ninewells.

The majority of the young people seen were aged between 13 and 16 but Ms Bastianelli said she and her colleague are seeing an increasing amount of 11-year-olds in the last two months.

Amongst the youngsters seen, cutting is the most common form of self-harm followed by overdose, although there are instances of strangulation, attempted hanging, shooting and head banging, inhaled fumes, albeit on a less frequent basis.

The service always encourage any youngster to return for a follow-up appointment, which also helps to put anxious parents’ minds at rest.

“We hope to monitor the statistics in future years to see if there is a pattern emerging in the time of year that youngsters self-harm,” said Ms Bastianelli.

“What we find is that January we are quite quiet, February picks up and March is really busy which ties in with young people having exams and the pressure of that and not wanting to disappoint their parents.”