Self-Injury

Historical Background

Three significant historical periods can be discerned that affect the population, prevalence, meaning, and practice of self-injury. Self-injury has clearly existed for a long time, although throughout most of history there has been little public awareness of the phenomenon. During this first era, practitioners acted mostly alone and in a social vacuum. Early mentions of self-injury from the time of Herodotus in the 5th century BCE through the Middle Ages depict self-injurers as religious fanatics, social outcasts, and the severely disturbed or mentally ill. People who injured themselves often referred to their acts by simply saying that they “hurt” themselves without realizing that there were others doing it as well.

During the mid-1990s, public knowledge of self-injury began to rise and a second era dawned, with depictions of the behavior appearing in books, films, television shows, magazines, newspapers, and other media. Several celebrities came out in public and admitted to having committed self-injury, and discussions of it flourished in many high schools. This burgeoning awareness, although still limited in scope, spread rapidly through segments of the population that were most likely to come into contact with self-injurers: adolescents, young adults, educators, doctors, and psychologists. It affected the way self-injurers thought about themselves and were regarded by others, but they still mainly kept to themselves, operating as loner deviants.

A third period began around 2001–2002, when websites began to appear on the Internet that focused on self-injury (self-mutilation, self-harm) complete with public chat rooms where people could interact with fellow and former self-injurers, those who wished to discourage the practice, and other visitors. Internet self-injury sites and groups have enabled the development of cyber subcultures and cyber relationships where communities of self-injurers flourish and grow. At the same time, the practice of self-injury became widespread among a broader range of people. Disaffected, alternative populations seized on it as a way to rebel and express their rejection of mainstream values. Structurally disadvantaged populations, such as homeless youth, minorities, the poor, and people in prisons and juvenile detention centers, turned to it out of frustration. Ordinary teenagers adopted it as a way to relieve the travails of typical adolescent development. Older people started revealing their self-injury to establish themselves as a group and differentiate from the “young and trendy” cutters. Young men channeled their anger and rage into injuring their bodies. A growing group of older hard-core users, who begin the practice to seek relief, settled into a lifetime pattern of chronic self-injury.

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