Police and medics responded to an emergency call from Republican Senator Ted Cruz’s Houston home last night.
Cruz’s 14-year-old daughter Caroline was hospitalized with self-inflicted knife cuts to her arms and is expected to recover, according to DailyMail.com.
Medics responded to the 911 call before 8 p.m. on Tuesday. Cruz was not at home at the time. He was in Washington, DC.
Reps for the senator said, “This is a family matter, and thankfully their daughter is OK. There were no serious injuries.”
Cruz and his wife, Heidi, also share daughter Catherine, 11.
Caroline’s injuries are likely the result of a cutting disorder, a mental health condition affecting mostly adolescents and teenagers.
Cutting was elevated from a symptom of depression or anxiety to a mental disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) to help bring more attention to the self-mutilation disorder.
Doctors say cutting is rarely related to suicide, since the cuts are rarely deep enough to open an artery.
Cutting is usually seen as a cry for help from a child who is battling depression and anxiety or suffers from a personality disorder.
Researchers haven’t been able to trace cutting to any one disorder. It is usually linked to anxiety or depression, eating disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and substance abuse problems, says Dr. David Shaffer, chief of the division of child and adolescent psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center.
“We know that [cutting] accounts for far fewer than 1 percent of all suicides,” says Shaffer. “And one of the characteristics of this disorder is that it’s repeated very, very frequently, so presumably a young person knows it’s not going to kill them.”
Michael Jackson’s daughter, Paris, was admitted to a mental hospital in 2013 for cutting her arms as a teenager.
