Self-harm has a strong prevalence within adolescent populations in Europe, and a potent relationship with suicide. In the UK, adolescent self-harm hospital admissions are rising each year. These statistics reflect the “tip of the iceberg”, with the majority of incidents hidden from public health networks. This invisibility creates barriers to: epidemiological information; the planning and evaluation of evidence-based support; health management within the complexity of adolescent self-harming behaviours to ensure recovery and healthy adolescent trajectories. It is also a serious health risk for this population group, and accidental death from self-harm is one of the common causes of injury-related adolescent death.

Within the aforementioned context, this paper describes a UK county-wide complex public health intervention (2013 to 2015) in regards to adolescent self-harm, with concerted action by key stakeholders in health, child welfare, education and social science due to concerns about the increasing self-harm rate within the adolescent population group. As self-harm is a complex behaviour, and the evidence-base for effective interventions is sparse, the development of protective factors within education, health and social care environments were targeted. A synergy of theoretical models from neuroscience and social science informed the intervention's logic model. The intervention's development phase utilised the Medical Research Council's guidance on complex interventions to improve public health, which this paper will exposit.