Self Injury

[Peppermint4life]

Through high school and even now, in college, a day does not go by that a student doesn't say that English class makes them want to cut their self, or a mildly unfortunate event has someone pantomiming running a razor over their wrist. I've done it on occasion myself. However, 17% of college students actually do harm them self. Hell, I've done it before.

Over the past year, I've began to notice marks on some of my friends' arms. When I ask about them, in private, I'm usually met with silence or some type of subject changer. After a bit of talking, they usually confide in me. I have one friend who burns them self, two friends who cut them self.

What is your honest opinion of people with self injurious behavior? I've met people who have ridiculed these individuals, claiming its for attention. Others who have just called them freaks. Some just said they got their rocks off that way. Before my personal history with self injury, I was among some of those who ridiculed them.

So, again, how do you feel about people who perform self injurious behavior (SIB)? Have you ever done anything of the like? etc....

Just general discussion of the topic lol.

[Sansa Stark]

As a (semi) former self harmer, it's irritating the stigma of "wanting attention" surrounding the issue, as it clouds the matter at hand: If someone is causing themselves bodily harm for attention it's probably time to step up and help, because clearly they don't know how to ask for it themselves.

That part really bothers me, because people are so desensitised to things that they don't see this as ****ed up?

Unfortunately a lot of mental problems are constantly dismissed as "just wanting attention."

[hip hop bunny hop]

Originally Posted by Paloma

That part really bothers me, because people are so desensitised to things that they don't see this as ****ed up?

Self-harm is not a cry for help; it's attention seeking dressed up as a cry for help. Give them attention and you're enabling that behavior.

[Peppermint4life]

Originally Posted by hip hop bunny hop

Self-harm is not a cry for help; it's attention seeking dressed up as a cry for help. Give them attention and you're enabling that behavior.

Even the people who try to keep it a secret?

[hip hop bunny hop]

Originally Posted by Peppermint4life

Even the people who try to keep it a secret?

The entire point of the behavior is that you can't keep it a secret. Some may do it on a level which is secretive compared to others, but even then it's relative. The question is, then, whom do they wish to keep this a secret from and why?

For some, I'd say they want to make it anything but blatantly obvious so people will only realize it after they've some sort personnel connection. The logic being, people will easily dismiss and try to avoid becoming involved in the life of an individual who does self mutilation; whereas, if you've a connection to a person, you're more likely to contribute to the pity party.

[Sansa Stark]

Originally Posted by hip hop bunny hop

Self-harm is not a cry for help; it's attention seeking dressed up as a cry for help. Give them attention and you're enabling that behavior.

Sorry, are you studying psych?

[midnight rain]

Originally Posted by Paloma

Sorry, are you studying psych?

Are you?

[hip hop bunny hop]

$5 says she is.

Originally Posted by Forward To Death

You're making this too convenient for your own argument. Masochism is to derive pleasure from pain or humiliation. On top of this, it's a stretch by all means to get attention seeking out of an extremely cherrypicked scenario of masochism. There's no humiliation involved in many cases, you just straight up enjoy pain.

So, we're in agreement that my depiction of the humiliation aspect of masochism is relatively accurate?

As far as your other point; I concede there may be some individuals who commit self-harm because they genuinely enjoy pain. However, I've yet to encounter or read about someone who gets off on making superficial cuts to their wrist in a mock suicidal manner.

[someonecompletelyrandom]

Originally Posted by hip hop bunny hop

Self-harm is not a cry for help; it's attention seeking dressed up as a cry for help. Give them attention and you're enabling that behavior.

Can't agree. I've found some information on reasons people self-harm and they seem to be legitimately convincing arguments, the least of which indicates casual "attention seeking".

Originally Posted by helpguide.org

• Expressing feelings you can’t put into words
• Releasing the pain and tension you feel inside
• Helping you feel in control
• Distracting you from overwhelming emotions or difficult life circumstances
• Relieving guilt and punishing yourself
• Making you feel alive, or simply feel something, instead of feeling numb

http://www.helpguide.org/mental/self_injury.htm#how

Many papers on self-harm (Miller, 1994; Favazza 1986, 1996; Connors, 1996a, 2000; Solomon & Farrand, 1996; Ousch et al., 1999; Suyemoto, 1998; and others), have uncovered possible motivations for self-injurious behavior:

• Escape from emptiness, depression, and feelings of unreality.
• Easing tension.
• Providing relief: when intense feelings build, self-injurers are overwhelmed and unable to cope. By causing pain, they reduce the level of emotional and physiological arousal to a bearable one.
• Relieving anger: many self-injurers have enormous amounts of rage within. Afraid to express it outwardly, they injure themselves as a way of venting these feelings.
• Escaping numbness: many of those who self-injure say they do it in order to feel something, to know that they're still alive.
• Grounding in reality, as a way of dealing with feelings of depersonalization and dissociation
• Maintaining a sense of security or feeling of uniqueness
• Obtaining a feeling of euphoria
• Preventing suicide
  
• Expressing emotional pain they feel they cannot bear
• Obtaining or maintaining influence over the behavior of others
• Communicating to others the extent of their inner turmoil
• Communicating a need for support
• Expressing or repressing sexuality
• Expressing or coping with feelings of alienation
• Validating their emotional pain -- the wounds can serve as evidence that those feelings are real
  
• Continuing abusive patterns: self-injurers tend to have been abused as children.
• Punishing oneself for being "bad"
• Obtaining biochemical relief: there is some thought that adults who were repeatedly traumatized as children have a hard time returning to a "normal" baseline level of arousal and are, in some sense, addicted to crisis behavior. Self-harm can perpetuate this kind of crisis state
• Diverting attention (inner or outer) from issues that are too painful to examine
• Exerting a sense of control over one's body
• Preventing something worse from happening

These reasons can be broadly grouped into three categories:

Affect regulation --

Trying to bring the body back to equilibrium in the face of turbulent or unsettling feelings. This includes reconnection with the body after a dissociative episode, calming of the body in times of high emotional and physiological arousal, validating the inner pain with an outer expression, and avoiding suicide because of unbearable feelings. In many ways, as Sutton says, self-harm is a "gift of survival." It can be the most integrative and self-preserving choice from a very limited field of options.

Communication --

Some people use self-harm as a way to express things they cannot speak. When the communication is directed at others, the SIB is often seen as manipulative. However, manipulation is usually an indirect attempt to get a need met; if a person learns that direct requests will be listened to and addressed the need for indirect attempts to influence behavior decreases. Thus, understanding what an act of self-harm is trying to communicate can be crucial to dealing with it in an effective and constructive way.

Control/punishment --

This category includes trauma reenactment, bargaining and magical thinking (if I hurt myself, then the bad thing I am fearing will be prevented), protecting other people, and self-control. Self-control overlaps somewhat with affect regulation; in fact, most of the reasons for self-harm listed above have an element of affect control in them.

In an interesting theory that combines all three categories, Miller (1994) posits an explanation for why such a large majority of peep who self-harm are female. Women are not socialized to express violence externally and when confronted with the vast rage many self-injurers feel, women tend to vent on themselves. She quotes the feminist poet Adrienne Rich:

"Most women have not even been able to touch
this anger except to drive it inward like a
rusted nail."
Miller says, "Men act out. Women act out by acting in." Another reason fewer men self-injure may be that men are socialized in a way that makes repressing feelings the norm. Linehan's (1993a) theory that self-harm results in part from chronic invalidation, from always being told that your feelings are bad or wrong or inappropriate, could explain the gender disparity in self-injury; men are generally brought up to hold emotion in.

Alexithymia

Alexithymia is a fairly recent psychological construct describing the state of not being able to describe the emotions one is feeling. Alexithymia was positively linked to self-injurious behavior in a 1996 study (Zlotnick, et el.) and is congruent with how people who self-injure often describe the emotional state before an injury; they frequently cannot pinpoint any particular feeling that was present. This is especially important in understanding the communicative function of self-injury: "Rather than use words to express feelings, an alexithymic's communication is an act aimed at making others feel [those same feelings]" (Zlotnick et al., 1996).

Self-capacities and Invalidation

A constructivist theory of self-injurious behavior (Deiter, Nicholls, & Pearlman, 2000) holds that people who self-injure usually have not developed three important self-capacities: the ability to tolerate strong affect, the ability to maintain a sense of self-worth, and the ability to maintain a sense of connection to others. The first of these speaks directly to the affect-regulation role of self-harm; the others are perhaps related to its communicative functions.

Pearlman et al. (2000) note that "when children experience shaming and punitive rhetoric or physical blows rather than responsive words" they cannot internalize others are loving and cannot develop the capacity to maintain a sense of connection to others. They further state, "The ability to experience, tolerate, and integrate strong affect cannot develop fully when strong feelings are met with punishment or derision." Having a sense that some feelings are unacceptable and not allowed also impairs this ability. And the ability to maintain a sense of oneself as a person of worth cannot be developed when a child never feels she is good enough, when her "existence and accomplishments are met with silence or abusive words or actions."

Interestingly, all of these conditions are found in invalidating environments, which Linehan and others have tied to future self-injury.

Finally, Haines and Williams (1997) found that self-mutilators reported more use of problem avoidance as a coping strategy and perceived themselves to have less control over problem-solving options. This feeling of disempowerment may in turn be related to the chronic invalidation many self-injurers have experienced.

http://www.palace.net/llama/psych/why.html

Notice specifically the subsection Communication. It makes the point that even attention seeking (manipulation) is an attempt to communicate something which the sufferer simply can't seem to communicate effectively, I'd personally imagine being for any range of psychosomatic reasons.

While I think chalking it up to attention seeking is the easy thing to do, I don't think it is the most sensitive or scientific approach. It seems to me like a shrug-off. I actually used to share a similar opinion. However, the research tends to show that there is no simple answer. As stated, this is not a black and white issue, and there seems to be no "majority cause" of this symptom. It's a difficult issue to approach subjectively, however I feel that like depression, it is simply misunderstood at this time and will eventually be brought to light as more sufferers come out and admit they have a problem.

[hip hop bunny hop]

Originally Posted by These guys

While I think chalking it up to attention seeking is the easy thing to do, I don't think it is the most sensitive...

I don't view sensitivity as innately superior to other attitudes.

Originally Posted by Forward To Death

I bet I could back up my argument with scientific evidence, and better logic. The very fact that masochism exists proves my point.

If you mean masochism in the sexual sense; that can be manifested in a few ways.

If we take masochism as humiliation, isn't that about the spectacle of humiliation? Even if it's taking place in a private, personal setting or situation, the masochist has internalized attitudes towards this behavior which allow them to feel humiliation.

Masochism & self mutilation just strikes me as a secular form of Christianity and the bizarre ways that religion has manifested repentance. As far as my feelings on repentance in general, Montaigne's similarly named essay (link) says it all better than I can.

Originally Posted by Paloma

Sorry, are you studying psych?

In that past I took courses in psychology, which I found to be essentially useless. The college areas of study I found most valuable were literature & anthropology.