Shameless Plugs

“Self-harm has become internal and non-communicative. It has become self-regulatory and not interpersonal. It is difficult not to see this change as relating to the much larger economic and political shifts of the late 1970s and early 1980s.”

HHS Contributor

It seems to me that we have a form of self-harm in the 1960s that is socially-embedded, accessed by social workers, and fundamentally understood as interpersonal behaviour. It is a very ‘social’ form of self-harm. In the 1980s, the kind of self-harm that resonates is one that focuses upon individual emotional states, and the practice of self-regulation. The very idea of ‘crying for help’ is recast as negative and manipulative.

What is self-harm, and where does it come from? These are the two questions that I am trying to answer in my new, open access book A History of Self-Harm in Britain: A Genealogy of Cutting and Overdosing (2015). The question really depends upon when and where you ask. In Britain during the 1950s and 1960s, the terms ‘self-harm’ and ‘self-damage’ largely signify taking an overdose of medication. It is also called ‘attempted suicide’, ‘self-poisoning’, ‘pseudocide’ and ‘propetia’ (from the Greek for ‘rashness’). The studies from which such terminology emerged were rooted in hospital Accident and Emergency departments (A&E). At this point, the overdose is generally understood as a disordered communication – a ‘cry for help’ – and is assessed by psychiatrists attached to hospitals, alongside another particular group of professionals: psychiatric social workers (PSWs). But the idea that ‘self harm’ essentially indicates ‘overdosing as a cry for help’ changes during the 1980s. In particular, the practice of self-cutting

as a form of tension release or emotional regulation gains more prominence. Initially studies of self-cutting emerge from inpatient units in North America and Britain. Despite being called things like ‘delicate cutting’ or ‘wrist-slashing’, these studies actually document a wide range of behaviours including self-burning, skin-picking, smashing windows, and swallowing objects such as pins or dominoes. However, self-cutting is repeatedly emphasized as being archetypal in some way (this is a topic I discuss in much more detail in another paper). Despite this emphasis on self-cutting, the behaviour presenting at hospitals doesn’t really change: between 80 and 95 per cent of the cases under the label ‘self-harm’ in hospital statistics remain self-poisoning. However, there are now huge numbers of studies from psychotherapists, counselors and psychiatrists documenting ‘self-cutters’. The behavioural stereotypes inaugurated during the 1980s remain substantially intact today. ‘Self-cutting as emotional self-regulation’ is still largely presumed to be the behaviour and motivation indicated by the term ‘self-harm’. The key questions are, why…