Self-Injury- There is an alternative

Essay by melissahHigh School, 12th grade July 2004

download word file, 9 pages 5.0 1 reviews

Downloaded 70 times

It affects all different kinds of people, with all different backgrounds, in all different social classes. Publication pending reported that 5.1 per cent of secondary school students surveyed in Victoria reported having deliberately harmed themselves The Western Australian Child Health Survey found similar rates of self-harm with 7.5 per cent of young people 12 to 16 years reporting that they had tried to harm themselves in the previous six months.

Self-injury is a self-preservation technique for many cutters, the self-mutilation relieves anxiety and /or depersonalization symptoms which could lead to psychosis or suicide if not alleviated. Self-harming can be reassuring and calming, it can give a person a feeling of control over their lives and of their bodies which they cannot experience in any other way.

It's relief through release. Most people Self-Injure to relieve some unpleasant emotion, ranging from anxiety to depression. Studies have suggested that when people who self-injure get emotionally overwhelmed, an act of self-harm brings their levels of psychological and physiological tension and arousal back to a bearable baseline level almost immediately.

Hurting themselves makes them feel something, where they otherwise feel numb to the world around them.

Others self-injure to translate mental or intangible pain into understandable pain. Some people deal with extremely painful memories or thoughts by deflecting the distress into pain that seems acceptable and controllable, like that of self-injury.

Self-Injury is seductive because you control it yourself.

The first time I self- injured was only just for fun, its was to show that I was strong and not afraid. As the sewing pin pierced into my flesh of the left wrist, it was deeply dragged into the shape of a small heart; I pressed hard against the wound to stop the blood from oozing out onto my school dress and waited till...