Understanding and Responding to Self-Harm summary

Learning about self-harm can be a confusing experience. There’s a lot of material available online, but some of it can seem melodramatic or designed to shock. Let’s try to reduce this confusion by exploring what we actually mean when we talk about self-harm. 

The key message here is: Self-harm is an action carried out by an individual to deliberately inflict pain or damage to the self. 

This is a useful definition because it keeps things broad and simple. 

The term “self-harm” relates to physical damage of the body. It’s important to note that self-harm is not a mental disorder, and it’s not a label that describes a person. This is important because people who self-harm are often described as “self-harmers.” Labeling someone like this is damaging – it implies that his self-harm defines him and that this aspect of his behavior is fixed and unchangeable. 

It’s also important to note that self-harm is intentional, in that the person deliberately damages himself as the end goal of the action. This differentiates it from activities like binge drinking or starving oneself in order to be thin. Although these activities may also cause harm, the person’s primary intention is not usually to hurt herself. 

We can also see that this definition of self-harm doesn’t specify a reason why people harm themselves. 

This ambiguity is deliberate – self-harm can include suicide attempts, as well as acts that are definitely not suicide attempts. When someone harms herself, we can’t make any assumptions about what her intentions were. Not every act of self-harm is a suicide attempt. With this being said, research has found that people who self-harm have a much higher suicide rate than the general population. 

Now that we understand the broad definition, we can begin to explore how people harm themselves. The two methods of self-harm are self-injury, such as with a blade, and self-poisoning, such as an overdose. 

Many people assume that self-harm only means injuring oneself. If you google self-harm, you will see lots of images of people cutting themselves. In contrast, we usually assume that people who overdose intend to commit suicide. But this is a false distinction. In reality, self-injury and self-poisoning are often not that different from each other. Both are acts of self-harm, and both might be associated with either wishing or not wishing to die. Tellingly, people who repeatedly harm themselves will often alternate between these two methods. 

In the next blink, we’ll take a closer look at what self-poisoning and self-injury commonly involve.