Your Life Line

As a way of coping with the pressure, she and her friend carved hearts into their arms with a pair of compasses.

"I think this is when it occurred to me that this could be a way of helping myself and letting the pain inside disappear," she explains. "It was a kind of release".

"I'd never known or heard of anyone self-harming so it didn't occur to me that that's what it was."

She would hurt herself at most once or twice a week in private in the school toilets.

Tors best friend Gary understands self-harm as he also cuts himself.

She moved on from using compasses to pencil sharpener blades and scalpels taken from the art room. She only cut on the tops of her arms to ensure that no one would see. For Tor, self-harm was private.

"It's not fashion, it's not attention seeking, it's not about being cool or hard."

"It's very secret, it's a secret thing."

By sixth form, the school and Tors parents had started to guess something was wrong. Tor was no longer achieving academically. She was often angry and would punch the school walls as a way of hurting herself.

"Because they are all bumpy, if you punched them hard enough you end up cutting your knuckles." she said.

The self-harm was still a secret, even as her family tried to help her. She saw a doctor and was diagnosed with depression.

By the age of 20, Tor had dropped out of agricultural college and was homeless. She found herself in Southampton and after living in a few homeless shelters was given a bedsit in a Southampton housing project run by the YMCA. It was here that her self-harm reached its peak.

She was self-harming on a daily basis. She bought a set of kitchen knives and would also use cigarettes and lighters to burn herself.

In a single year, she was treated in hospital on over 30 occasions.