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Kelly Holmes tells how she self-harmed at height of athletics career

Kelly Holmes
Kelly Holmes said self-harm was a way to ‘release the anguish that I had.’ Photograph: Stuart C Wilson/Getty Images

Dame Kelly Holmes has spoken about how she self-harmed at the height of her athletic career as figures emerged showing mental health problems are rising sharply among teenage girls and young women.

Holmes, who won gold in the 800m and 1500m at the Athens Olympics in 2004, said the year before her victories she was cutting herself regularly to release the anguish she was experiencing as a result of suffering sporting injuries.

Holmes said: “At my lowest, I was cutting myself with scissors every day that I was injured.”

She spoke about her experience with depression at the new Health and Wellbeing Live show near her home in Kent.

The former Olympic champion spoke out as figures from the NHS revealed how anxiety, depression, insecurity and low self-esteem linked to body image are causing a growing crisis in teenage girls and young women.

Mental health specialists say it is a “deeply worrying” trend that is far less pronounced among boys of the same age. They warn that the NHS lacks the resources to adequately tackle the problem.

NHS data obtained by the Guardian revealed on Saturday that the number of times a girl aged 17 or under had been admitted to hospital in England because of self-harm had jumped from 10,500 to more than 17,500 a year over the past decade – a rise of 68%. The jump among boys was much lower: 26%.

Holmes shared an image taken immediately after she was injured during the athletics world championships in 1997. It was one of seven injuries that led her to self-harm.

Speaking to BBC South East, she said after “ups and downs for so many years” she got to the point where she looked in the mirror and “didn’t want to be here”.

She added: “The scissors were in the bathroom and I used them to release the anguish that I had. It was really a bad place to be.

“But my biggest message to people is that you can get out of that and you can still achieve. There is always a light at the end of the tunnel.”

Becky Randall, co-founder of Health & Wellbeing Live, said: “[Kelly] struggled but she kept going.

“So many of us are inhibited by a black cloud that sometimes descends, by feeling not good enough.

“I want people to be able to understand that they are not alone and that talking about it is what really helps. It’s got to be out there.”

Government-funded research last week showed that one in four (24%) girls aged 14, and 9% of boys the same age in the UK are beset by such negative emotions – including loneliness, self-hatred and feeling unloved – that they are depressed. A decade earlier the rate of depression seen in girls was half that - 12% – while in boys it was 5.5%, said Dr Praveetha Patalay, the lead author of the study.