How Can We Reduce Self-Harm From Starting?
Hello, everyone. I just had an idea, a thought that sprang to mind and thought Id share it with you all as well. For those of us who started self-harming, it was for various reasons. But the main overarching reason was because what we had in our coping tool box just werent enough for the emotion that we were feeling. Why was that? How can we change it? I know I dont have all the answers, and Im not sure if we ever will. Self-harm served a purpose for us, and as a general guideline, it takes more positive tools to overcome this one negative one. That just goes to show how strong of a grasp self-harm and other negative coping tools have on us. Of course, it doesnt mean you cant recover- the fact that recovery is used so often around these topics proves that. But how did we reach that emotion in the first place? Can we stop it from happening? I dont know, but we can try. And here are some of the ideas Ive managed to come up with.
Firstly, teaching Mental Health First Aid (MHFA), and making it more available and accessible for all. In my opinion, it could be incredibly helpful for everybody, as everyone has a mental health and we will all need someone to vent to and talk to when things go bad. So, what exactly is MHFA? It is first aid- steps taken to help someone in the beginning of the event- given to someone who is experiencing a mental health crisis, who is experiencing worsening symptoms or is developing a mental health problem. First aid is given until a professional service or resource can be found, or until the crisis resolves on its own. There are many MHFA courses being taught around the world, and I myself have done it. Its a great stepping stone to learning about different mental health disorders and substance abuse disorders, and it teaches you how to start the conversation with the person youre worried about.
Stemming from that point, teaching and advertising the basics of emotional self-care such as labelling emotions and acting with them can be really useful for everyone. Emotional self-care is knowing what youre feeling, and how to deal or cope with them in a healthy manner for all. Here is an article explaining and giving examples of emotional self-care. Emotional self-care can help reduce how overwhelmed we feel or how high our emotions feel, which many people who self-harm said caused their journey to begin. Emotional self-care emphasises the importance of boundaries and healthy coping tools, which is always a good thing to learn and remember.
If youre a parent, leading by example can be really beneficial in teaching your children how to deal with their emotions. Children tend to be really observant, and learn and copy behaviours from what they see others do. As a parent, you are your childrens first role models in life. So, by showing healthy ways of coping with stress, anger, sadness etc., you can indirectly teach and influence your childs way of coping later in life. In this way, you may need to educate yourself on healthy ways of coping and teaching your kids how to do so for themselves. If your child has done something thats made you angry, screaming at them may not be as beneficial as talking to them as to why youre angry, and next steps. Destressing by taking deep breaths and walking away could teach your children what to do when theyre angry. By doing these actions so early on, it can gradually decrease the number of children, teenagers and adults who self-harm in future generations.
To help with the above, putting self-harm into the education curriculum could make self-harm feel less stigmatised, bust the myths and increase awareness surrounding it. Having self-harm awareness days and events both inside and outside schools can aid the effect. In addition to that idea, encouraging all schools to have a mental health-based extracurricular program/club/group would be beneficial, and teaching self-harm within that group. With knowledge comes power. This knowledge can help change the way we speak about mental health in general as well as self-harm. Talking openly about self-harm can make it less of a taboo topic and open up more conversations, which at the moment, benefits more than it does harm.
In addition to the above, it would be really useful to have a program be taught to all school staff based around self-harm. School staff are key gatekeepers for children accessing professional help with their issues. There have been countless stories regarding school staff acting in less-than-helpful manners towards children opening up about self-harm. Teaching school staff simple facts about what self-harm is, how to identify people who might be self-harming or going in that direction and how to bring the conversation up and keep the conversation going could be really beneficial. This will help immediately decreasing the number of people self-harming, and also help school staff feel more comfortable talking about it openly with students in general.
This post can be generalised to include mental health as a whole, but the examples are dedicated more to self-harm. Im sure there are many other options reducing the self-harm incidence rate, but these are just a few examples that I could come up with. Feel free to reply with your thoughts and comments, and answer the questions down below!
Questions if youd like to answer them:
What can we do right now as individuals to reduce the self-harm incidence rate? (Incidence rate being the amount of new self-harm cases over a period of time)
What do you think is being done as a society to help stop self-harm from occurring? Do you think theyre positive or negative ways?
Do you have any other ideas to add to reduce self-harm from starting?
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@rebecca947
This is such a good post! Thanks for sharing your thoughts and suggestions on that matter, its enlightening and really important to think about all this!
Im not sure how we could efficiently reduce the occurrences of new self-harmers. Its only my opinion based on my experience but Id stay a greater work can be done on helping new self-harmers rather than shaming them and calling them attention-wh*res. Because thats one thing Id like to add about school, school staff is important for sure but theres also a lot of awareness to give to all the other students. Too many times Ive heard people laughing at someone with scars on their arms, seen people be avoided because of it and thought that theyre some suicidal weirdo or just looking for attention. This is really hard on these people that end up being avoided by everyone since the popular kids don't allow them in; aaaand this is just as hard for the people who are with this group of people and have hidden scars which theyll sure never open up about to after that. So Id actually say that self-care and most importantly coping mechanisms, but also general mental-health awareness and open-mindfulness should be taught to students as well, maybe from an early age.
As you mentioned it so well, maybe if we all had a varied/big enough coping toolbox and the awareness needed to handle our emotions, to talk about them, maybe a good number of people who turn to self-harm wouldnt even start in the first place, at least I know I might not have turned to self-harm if I had been able to understand and talk about my feelings (writing all that just made me change my mind and see that there actually are good ways to avoid new self-harmers lol)
@rebecca947
Thank you for posting this Rebecca, Linear is right this is an important and very well written post. :) I look up to you very much in terms of self-harm recovery advocating and thank you for all the work you do in that area.
What can we do right now as individuals to reduce the self-harm incidence rate? (Incidence rate being the amount of new self-harm cases over a period of time)
I think the main thing we can do right now is to build less / stop the stigma around the topic of self-harm. I feel like self-harm is such a complicated subject right now and it shouldn't be. It should be simple: it shouldn't be promoted, those whoa are doing it should be helped, and those who have stopped doing it should also be supported. But unfortunately, there is so much about "attention wanting" and "faking" and all that crap about the topic and it just makes everyone feel less supported. :(
What do you think is being done as a society to help stop self-harm from occurring? Do you think theyre positive or negative ways? I think society has done more recently in advocate groups that are fighting to support self-harm recoverees and just more talk and awareness about it in general. But in the past, especially in the few years when I was self-harming myself, society was really toxic about it and it just made the process of recovery so much more difficult for me and the people around me that were also trying to recover.
Do you have any other ideas to add to reduce self-harm from starting? Start teaching healthy coping skills and start teaching mental health care/importance in schools. And STOP saying that self-harm is done for attention.
Thank you again Rebecca <3