
                                   Site news
                                       
Site search added

   You can now [1]perform a keyword search on all pages on this site. The
   program comes from [2]extropia.com, a site with several useful
   freeware CGIs.
   
Site update begins

   You probably noticed the [3]new look of this site. Over the rest of
   the summer I'll be updating each page and applying the new site design
   to it. [4]Feedback is always welcome.
   
Living with SI page update

   The [5]living with self-injury page has been rewritten and a great
   deal of new information has been added.
   
National SI Awareness Day -- March 1, 2002

   [6]National Self-Injury Awareness Day will be March 1, 2002. On this
   day, people across the United States whose lives have been changed in
   some way by the psychological phenomenon of self-injury (also known as
   deliberate self-harm or self-inflicted violence) will be providing
   educational information to doctors, hospital decision- makers,
   therapists, school counselors, and other medical and mental health
   professionals in an effort to raise awareness of self-injury and
   debunk some of the myths surrounding it.
   
   You can have the basic [7]fact sheet emailed to you. An accompanying
   brochure, press release, and list of suggestions for distribution are
   being prepared. A general information sheet for participants will have
   suggestions about who to target in your area; who to contact about
   getting permission to speak in schools; where to send press releases;
   ways to get the information out and stay anonymous; etc.
   
   If you'd like to participate, please [8]send email with your name,
   city, nearest large city, and activities you're interested in.
   
Old news

Washington D.C. -- SAMHSA held a meeting to plan a national agenda about SI

   I was flown out for the meeting, held at the end of March.
   
   It was a cool meeting. There were about 30 people the first day and 20
   the second. We had a couple of lawyers, a woman who's been involved
   with the Boston women's health book collective for decades [and for
   whom I am currently critiquing a chapter of her new book on
   self-harm], a philosopher, a prison sociologist, a few psychiatrists
   and psychologists, some mental health program people, a few consumers,
   the woman who publishes "The Cutting Edge," and me.
   
   The goal was to produce a "vision statement" and specific
   recommendations for the Center for Mental Health about how to
   implement it. Dusty Miller was there, Esther Giller from Sidran was
   there, and as I said, Ruta Mazelis of The Cutting Edge was there.
   Favazza was there but left partway into the first day.
   
   One of the things that was interesting was the people who had not been
   directly involved with this before talking about how they felt weird
   even reading a book about self-injury on the plane or telling people
   who asked what conference it was they were going to, and how people
   just shut down when they mentioned it. The stigma is incredible.
   
   Some important things that I think were established:
     * Practitioners have to deal with their own feelings of
       revulsion/fear/disgust/uneasiness about this behavior; patients
       shouldn't be coerced into stopping or signing "no self-harm"
       contracts because the doctor can't deal with the issue
       him/herself.
     * Self-injury should be recognized as a coping mechanism that
       serves/served a legitimate purpose in the lives of people who do
       it, and treatment should not focus solely on the injury but also
       on the underlying causes. I do believe strongly that dealing with
       the self-injury in some way (mixing in new coping mechanisms
       and/or taking control of it) is essential so that work can be done
       on the underlying causes. But it's not enough to force someone to
       quit then say, "Okay, you're fixed!"
     * Self-injury by itself should not be considered grounds for
       involuntary commitment.
     * Emergency-room doctors need to be educated about the fact that
       people who self-injure and seek treatment for their wounds are not
       just doing it to make the doctor's life difficult and they deserve
       complete, caring, and humane treatment -- no more stitches without
       anesthesia, no more being told you don't deserve a blood
       transfusion, no more automatically being treated as an attempted
       suicide.
     * A public awareness campaign using simple, direct language needs to
       be instituted to educate the general public about the nature of
       self-injury; it must be made clear that self-injury is not a
       suicide attempt and not necessarily a manifestation of borderline
       personality disorder or psychosis.
     * Treatment needs to focus on a choice-based model, not a deficit
       model. The choices, culture (of self-injurers as a group and as
       individuals) and experiences of self-injurers need to be respected
       and validated when treatment is considered.
     * Education for practitioners and the public should include
       booklets, a media campaign, and a national clearinghouse for
       self-injury information.
     * "Forced treatment" is an oxymoron.
     * Patients and practitioners need to be partners in healing, not
       superior/subordinate. People who self-injure need to be asked what
       works for them and what doesn't.
     * Self-injury is often a means of communicating things that can't be
       spoken; one focus should be on helping people find more effective
       ways to speak what they need to say and on giving people a place
       to be heard.
     * People need to realize that "safety" has very different
       connotations for us, that it is possible to cut/burn/hit yourself
       safely, that threats to the spirit and the soul freak most of us
       more than threats to the body.
     * Maybe one reason this is more prevalent among women than men
       (besides women not being socialized to violence) is that men are
       socialized away from expressing their feelings. So a state in
       which feeling cannot be expressed, in which emotion has been
       invalidated, might be less stressful in those men who have been
       successfully socialized to not speak what they feel.
     * The goal of treatment should focus on expanding the ways in which
       people who SI can express emotion and not necessarily on stopping
       the behavior as soon as possible by whatever means necessary.
       
   There was more, and I don't know how much of this will make it into
   the monograph they're preparing, but I'm still really glad I went.
   [INLINE]
   
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References

   1. file://localhost/usr/home/llama/Web/psych/intro.html#search
   2. http://extropia.com/
   3. file://localhost/usr/home/llama/Web/psych/newlook.html
   4. mailto:llama@palace.net?design
   5. file://localhost/usr/home/llama/Web/psych/living.html
   6. file://localhost/usr/home/llama/Web/psych/nsiad.html
   7. http://www.service4you.net/brandon/aware.html
   8. mailto:llama@palace.net
   9. file://localhost/usr/home/llama/Web/psych/injury.html
