Mental healthcare professionals often overlook and potentially misunderstand nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI), particularly in young people. These behaviors, which include cutting, burning, bleeding, and in some cultures cutting ones hair and tattooing without parental consent, are also understudied. The result is large gap in the academic literature.
The journal of Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry (CCPP) has recently published an entire issue that brings together research and authors discussing nonsuicidal self-injury from across the globe. In an editorial outlining the issue, author Nicholas J. Westers, a pediatric psychologist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, briefly discusses each of the articles in the newest issue of CCPP, highlighting their importance and relevance. He writes:
âNSSI is a strong risk factor for attempting suicide and research that seeks to understand how culture influences conceptualizations of NSSI and, therefore, potential interventions for addressing it, seems to be in its infancy. We know that adults and young people from many different cultures engage in NSSI, often for reasons that are different than those typically endorsed in Western countries but the voices of those with lived experience of self-injury who are not White or do not identify as White are underrepresented in research on the topic. Perhaps this editorial can serve as a call to action to increase representation of racially and culturally diverse individuals in the field of NSSI research.â

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Non-suicidal self-injury OBVIOUSLY cannot be understood when it is considered in terms of the broad social phenomenology. It can ONLY be understood, OBVIOUSLY, by the person who becomes suicidal, because they are the only ones who can see the actual social and psychological environment as it is, and their accurate description of the vicissitudes, conflicts and confusions within this environment is the full explanation of what actually took place and how it took place, in this case how non-suicidal self-injury took place. It’s not abstract for me because I used to cut myself, and I know what took place. I would look in the mirror, aged 14 or so, asking “who the fuck are you? Who the fuck are you?” It didn’t seem like me, or I didn’t seem real, and cutting myself made me feel more real – that is all. You can psychoanalyse that until the cows come home but it is in the unprejudiced observation of the wordless real through which this real is understood, and it is only through this understanding of what is that our psychological problems are put away. This is a fact, even if we are factory farm animals that can’t understand this fact. I would put away the animal rather then the truth, because the animal is the truth in me.
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“Suicide and self-injury are profoundly complicated behaviors that are often associated with mental illness.”
Bullshit. Suicide and self-injury are profoundly complicated behaviors that are usually associated with being on the receiving end of emotional abuse and neglect in a culture that is profoundly exploitive.
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