Fahman is 18. Rolling up his sleeves, he displays a battlefield of scars on his arms. “Yeah,” he says, “I cut myself. I feel it, but it doesn’t hurt me. I am awake, I see myself bleeding, but I don’t feel it because I am taking a pill.” He has a bag of pills in his sock. How many has he taken today? “I’m on five, and I’m chill,” he says.

It is early afternoon, and something is rotten in the backstreets of Tripoli.

Split by Syria Street are the neighborhoods of Jabal Mohsen and Bab al-Tabbaneh, which are split, too, by sectarian divides. Bab al-Tabbaneh is broadly Sunni and pro-Future Movement, and Jabal Mohsen is largely Alawi. They are both subject to high poverty and unemployment, and are both said to be influenced and armed by powerful backers. This June, the area erupted into violence, and clashes between the two sides left dozens dead, hundreds injured and thousands displaced. The violence was just part of wide unrest in Tripoli, which saw city-center bombings in August and September.

Day-to-day fighting may have died down for now, and a reconciliation agreement was signed last month by Future Movement leader Saad Hariri and Alawi leader Ali Eid, but a visit to Bab al-Tabbaneh does not inspire hope for the area.  Beyond the poverty and the sectarianism, talking to the young men there fast reveals a disturbing sub-culture of drinking, paranoia, drug abuse and self mutilation.

Haidar runs the local youth football team, does some political work, and everyone on the street knows his name. He rounds up a few of the wild-eyed young guys hanging round a billiard club and takes them to his parents’ flat, on the roof of which is a broken sofa where they hang out and take drugs.

Over tea, brought with infinite care by Haidar’s small cousins, they tell their stories.

Ahmad, 22, is wearing a T-shirt that emblazoned with the words “Beauty Pageant.” With glazed eyes, he takes a very, very old prescription from his wallet and unfolds it. “I take pills,” he says “because the doctor prescribes it.

“And I don’t cut or burn myself any more. But other guys take pills, they don’t know what they are, and they drink beer…It isn’t organized, but mostly they get together at night, take pills, drink beer, make fun of each other. They become unreal, people out of reality, and they do the same thing over and over, every day.”

Violence in their homes is widespread, he says, and so is self-harm. “There are a lot of guys who cannot afford pills or beer. They buy a liter of gasoline [and inhale the fumes] and get violent. So they hurt themselves to hurt their loved ones. They will cut themselves in front of their brother or father to make them feel guilty.”

Is this common? “It is, and it is because of the situation we are in,” he says, “I used to cut myself, and I know what the guys are going through. It is not easy.” It is frustration at long-term poverty that causes the problems, he says. "A mature man will put his hand in his pocket and not have 1000LL, and he sees his father helpless and his mother, too. There is no one to help him, and he cannot help himself."

Fahman, too, expresses hopelessness. "I'll stop the drugs," he says, "as soon as I get a job." He started them, he says, after he lost his other job, working with a scrap iron merchant. The cuts on his body, he says, he inflicts alone, but, "I have friends that do it together."

Each scar, he says, "has a meaning based on a certain misery. I remember each one, when it happened and how." The biggest one, he says, is from when then fighting started in the area. "In the summer I was broke, and I got angry, and anybody else would have to do things to express themselves, and that's what I did. I was depressed."

How many people take drugs and cut themselves? "The whole of Bab al-Tabbaneh is suffering from this."

He does not know the name of the pills that he takes, but he and others explain that they cause hallucination and paranoia.

Haidar, too, blames the conflict as well on the poverty. "Since the fighting," he says, "the area has been taken way back." He and Fahman both say that poverty and desperation contribute to the drifts into extremism and violence. People working on outreach projects in the area – with young people from Jabal Mohsen as well as Bab al-Tabbaneh – confirm that the trend for cutting is widespread. “They mutilate themselves,” says one. “You have to build up so much trust,” before they let you see their arms or bodies.

The area is the most densely populated in Tripoli, and many residents are relatively migrants from the impoverished rural areas of North Lebanon. A 2006 report found that truancy reached 50% in the area, and more than half of the area’s households have an income of about 200,000 LL (about $130) per month.

Arabi Akkawi, whose father was the Sunni leader in Bab al-Tabbaneh known as Abu Arabi, killed in 1986 during the civil war, now works for the Future Movement in Tripoli. He despairs of the area and of the lives of the young people, particularly young men, growing up there. “The new generation in Bab al-Tabbaneh,” he says, “is the same as the generation from 30 years ago. They are still living in poverty, they are still unemployed, and they are still uneducated. All this, and the poverty they are in, it’s good grounds for extremism, for al-Qaeda and those kinds of people.

“And another kind of extremism is doing drugs. They are losing their lives, basically.”