name | Self-harm |
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diseasesdb | 30605 |
diseasesdb mult | |
icd10 | |
meshid | D016728}} |
Self-harm in childhood is relatively rare but the rate has been increasing since the 1980s. Self-harm is listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV-TR) as a symptom of borderline personality disorder. However patients with other diagnoses may also self-harm, including those with depression, anxiety disorders, substance abuse, eating disorders, post-traumatic stress disorder, schizophrenia, and several personality disorders. Self-harm is also apparent in high-functioning individuals who have no underlying clinical diagnosis. The motivations for self-harm vary and it may be used to fulfill a number of different functions. These functions include self-harm being used as a coping mechanism which provides temporary relief of intense feelings such as anxiety, depression, stress, emotional numbness and a sense of failure or self-loathing. Self-harm is often associated with a history of trauma and abuse, including emotional abuse, sexual abuse, drug dependence, eating disorders, or mental traits such as low self-esteem or perfectionism. There is also a positive statistical correlation between self-harm and emotional abuse. There are a number of different methods that can be used to treat self-harm and which concentrate on either treating the underlying causes or on treating the behaviour itself. When self-harm is associated with depression, antidepressant drugs and treatments may be effective. Other approaches involve avoidance techniques, which focus on keeping the individual occupied with other activities, or replacing the act of self-harm with safer methods that do not lead to permanent damage.
Self-harm is most common in adolescence and young adulthood, usually first appearing between the ages of 12 and 24. However, self-harm can occur at any age, including in the elderly population. The risk of serious injury and suicide is higher in older people who self-harm. Self-harm is not limited to humans. Captive non-human animals are also known to participate, such as birds and monkeys.
A common belief regarding self-harm is that it is an attention-seeking behaviour; however, in most cases, this is inaccurate. Many self-harmers are very self-conscious of their wounds and scars and feel guilty about their behaviour leading them to go to great lengths to conceal their behaviour from others. They may offer alternative explanations for their injuries, or conceal their scars with clothing. Self-harm in such individuals is not associated with suicidal or para-suicidal behaviour. A person who self-harms is not usually seeking to end their own life; it has been suggested instead that they are using self-harm as a coping mechanism to relieve emotional pain or discomfort. For many individuals self-harm is often an attempt to communicate one's distress. Studies of individuals with developmental disabilities (such as mental retardation) have shown self-harm being dependent on environmental factors such as obtaining attention or escape from demands. Though this is not always the case, some individuals suffer from dissociation and they harbor a desire to feel real and/or to fit in to society's rules.
The motivations for self-harm vary as it may be used to fulfill a number of different functions. These functions include self-harm being used as a coping mechanism which provides temporary relief of intense feelings such as anxiety, depression, stress, emotional numbness and a sense of failure or self-loathing. There is also a positive statistical correlation between self-harm and emotional abuse. Self-harm may become a means to manage pain, in contrast to the pain that may have been experienced earlier in the sufferer's life (e.g. through abuse) over which they had no control.
Other motives for self-harm do not fit into medicalised models of behaviour and may seem incomprehensible to others, as demonstrated by this example:
Assessment of motives in a medical setting is usually based on precursors to the incident, circumstances and information from the patient. However, limited studies show that professional assessments tend to suggest more manipulative or punitive motives than personal assessments.
The UK ONS study reported only two motives: "to draw attention" and "because of anger". For some people harming oneself can be a way to draw attention to the need for help and to ask for assistance in an indirect way but may also be an attempt to affect others and to manipulate them in some way emotionally. However, those with chronic, repetitive self-harm often do not want attention and hide their scars carefully.
Many people who self-harm state that it allows them to "go away" or dissociate, separating the mind from feelings that are causing anguish. This may be achieved by tricking the mind into believing that the present suffering being felt is caused by the self-harm instead of the issues they were facing previously: the physical pain therefore acts as a distraction from the original emotional pain. To complement this theory, one can consider the need to "stop" feeling emotional pain and mental agitation. "A person may be hyper-sensitive and overwhelmed; a great many thoughts may be revolving within their mind, and they may either become triggered or could make a decision to stop the overwhelming feelings." The sexual organs may be deliberately hurt as a way to deal with unwanted feelings of sexuality, or as a means of punishing sexual organs that may be perceived as having responded in contravention to the person's wellbeing (e.g., responses to childhood sexual abuse).
Those who engage in self-harm face the contradictory reality of harming themselves while at the same time obtaining relief from this act. It may even be hard for some to actually initiate cutting, but they often do because they know the relief that will follow. For some self-harmers this relief is primarily psychological while for others this feeling of relief comes from the beta endorphins released in the brain. Endorphins are endogenous opioids that are released in response to physical injury, act as natural painkillers, and induce pleasant feelings and would act to reduce tension and emotional distress. Many self-harmers report feeling very little to no pain while self-harming and, for some, deliberate self-harm may become a means of seeking pleasure.
Alternatively, self-harm may be a means of feeling something, even if the sensation is unpleasant and painful. Those who self-harm sometimes describe feelings of emptiness or numbness (anhedonia), and physical pain may be a relief from these feelings. "A person may be detached from himself or herself, detached from life, numb and unfeeling. They may then recognise the need to function more, or have a desire to feel real again, and a decision is made to create sensation and 'wake up'."
As a coping mechanism, self-harm can become psychologically addictive because, to the self-harmer, it works; it enables him/her to deal with intense stress in the current moment. The patterns sometimes created by it, such as specific time intervals between acts of self-harm, can also create a behavioural pattern that can result in a wanting or craving to fulfill thoughts of self-harm.
In individuals with developmental disabilities, occurrence of self-harm is often demonstrated to be related to its effects on the environment, such as obtaining attention or desired materials or escaping demands. As developmentally disabled individuals often have communication or social deficits, self-harm may be their way of obtaining these things which they are otherwise unable to obtain in a socially appropriate way (such as by asking). One approach for treating self-harm thus is to teach an alternative, appropriate response which obtains the same result as the self-harm.
The best available research indicates that in the United States up to 4% of adults self-harm with approximately 1% of the population engaging in chronic or severe self-harm. Current research suggests that the rates of self-harm are much higher among young people with the average age of onset between 14 and 24. The earliest reported incidents of self-harm are in children between 5 and 7 years old. In the UK in 2008 rates of self-harm in young people could be as high as 33%. In addition there appears to be an increased risk of self-harm in college students than among the general population. In a study of undergraduate students in the US, 9.8% of the students surveyed indicated that they had purposefully cut or burned themselves on at least one occasion in the past. When the definition of self-harm was expanded to include head-banging, scratching oneself, and hitting oneself along with cutting and burning, 32% of the sample said they had done this. In Ireland, a study found that instances of hospital-treated self-harm were much higher in City and Urban Districts, than in Rural settings. The CASE (Child & Adolescent Self-harm in Europe) study suggests that the life-time risk of self-injury is ~1:7 for women and ~1:25 for men.
The WHO/EURO Multicentre Study of Suicide, established in 1989, demonstrated that, for each age group, the female rate of self-harm exceeded that of the males, with the highest rate among females in the 13–24 age group and the highest rate among males in the 12–34 age group. However, this discrepancy has been known to vary significantly depending upon population and methodological criteria, consistent with wide-ranging uncertainties in gathering and interpreting data regarding rates of self-harm in general. Such problems have sometimes been the focus of criticism in the context of broader psychosocial interpretation. For example, feminist author Barbara Brickman has speculated that reported gender differences in rates of self-harm are due to deliberate socially-biased methodological and sampling errors, directly blaming medical discourse for pathologising the female.
This gender discrepancy is often distorted in specific populations where rates of self-harm are inordinately high, which may have implications on the significance and interpretation of psychosocial factors other than gender. A study in 2003 found an extremely high prevalence of self-harm among 428 homeless and runaway youth (age 16 to 19) with 72% of males and 66% of females reporting a past history of self-harm. However, in 2008, a study of young people and self-harm saw the gender gap close, with 32% of young females, and 22% of young males admitting to self-harm. Studies also indicate that males who self-harm may also be at a greater risk of completing suicide.
There does not appear to be a difference in motivation for self-harm in adolescent males and females. For example, for both genders there is an incremental increase in deliberate self-harm associated with an increase in consumption of cigarettes, drugs and alcohol. Triggering factors such as low self-esteem and having friends and family members who self-harm are also common between both males and females. One limited study found that, among those young individuals who do self-harm, both genders are just as equally likely to use the method of skin-cutting. However, females who self-cut are more likely than males to explain their self-harm episode by saying that they had wanted to punish themselves. In New Zealand, more females are hospitalised for intentional self-harm than males. Females more commonly choose methods such as self-poisoning that generally are not fatal, but still serious enough to require hospitalisation.
Some of the causes of deliberate self-poisoning in Sri Lankan adolescents included bereavement and harsh discipline by parents. The coping mechanisms are being spread in local communities as people are surrounded by others who have previously deliberately harmed themselves or attempted suicide. One way of reducing self-harm would be to limit access to poisons; however many cases involve pesticides or yellow oleander seeds, and the reduction of access to these agents would be difficult. Great potential for the reduction of self-harm lies in education and prevention, but limited resources in the developing world make these methods challenging.
Pao (1969) differentiated between delicate (low lethality) and coarse (high lethality) self-mutilators who cut. The "delicate" cutters were young, multiple episodic of superficial cuts and generally had borderline personality disorder diagnosis. The "coarse" cutters were older and generally psychotic. Ross and McKay (1979) categorized self-mutilators into 9 groups: cutting, biting, abrading, severing, inserting, burning, ingesting or inhaling and hitting and constricting.
After the 1970s the focus of self-harm shifted from Freudian psycho-sexual drives of the patients.
Walsh and Rosen (1988) created four categories numbered by Roman numerals I–IV, defining Self-mutilation as rows II, III and IV
! Classification | ! Examples of Behavior | ! Degree of Physical Damage | ! Psychological State | ! Social Acceptability |
I | Ear-piercing, nail-biting, small tattoos, cosmetic surgery (not considered self-harm by the majority of the population) | Superficial to mild | Benign | Mostly accepted |
II | Piercings, saber scars, ritualistic clan scarring, sailor and gang tattoos | Mild to moderate | Benign to agitated | Subculture acceptance |
III | Wrist- or body-cutting, self-inflicted cigarette burns and tattoos, wound-excoriation | Mild to moderate | Psychic crisis | Accepted by some subgroups but not by the general population |
IV | Severe | Psychotic decompensation | Unacceptable |
Favazza and Rosenthal (1993) reviewed hundreds of studies and divided self-mutilation into two categories: culturally sanctioned self-mutilation and deviant self-mutilation. Favazza also created two subcategories of sanctioned self-mutilations; rituals and practices. The rituals are mutilations repeated generationally and "reflect the traditions, symbolism, and beliefs of a society" (p. 226). Practices are historically transient and cosmetic such as piercing of earlobes, nose, eyebrows as well as male circumcision (for non-Jews) while Deviant self-mutilation is equivalent to self-harm.
Self-harm is also practised by the sadhu or Hindu ascetic, in Catholic mortification of the flesh, in ancient Canaanite mourning rituals as described in the Ras Shamra tablets and in the Shi'ite annual ritual of self-flagellation, using chains and swords, that takes place during Ashura where the Shi'ite sect mourne the martyrdom of Imam Hussein.
Category:Abnormal psychology Category:Aggression Category:Mental health *
ar:إيذاء النفس cs:Sebepoškozování da:Selvmutilation de:Selbstverletzendes Verhalten el:Αυτοβασανισμός es:Automutilación eo:Memvundanta konduto fr:Automutilation ko:자해 it:Autolesionismo he:פגיעה עצמית lv:Paškaitējums lt:Savižala nl:Automutilatie ja:自傷行為 no:Selvskading pl:Samookaleczenie pt:Automutilação ru:Самоповреждение simple:Self-injury sk:Sebapoškodzovanie fi:Itsetuhoisuus sv:Självskadebeteende tr:Kendini yaralamaThis text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
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