Self-injury in social context: an emerging sociology

Abstract

While self-injury is often referred to as self-harm in public discourse, the term has a more general meaning in medical discourse, referring to (following the National Institute of Health and Care Excellence) 'acts of intentional self-poisoning or self-injury irrespective of type of motivation' (2011, p. 5). The medical definition of self-harm then includes but is not limited to non-suicidal self-injury. 2 Liz Frost's important monograph Young Women and the Body was published in 2001, but dealt with eating disorders as well as self-injury.

Risk and Protective Factors Associated With Support of Violent Radicalization: Variations by Geographic Location

“…For this generation, the adoption of a dystopian view of life seems to be a strategy to confront the uncertain future and represent the existential doom associated with it (Venkatesh et al, 2019). Thus the endorsement of attitudes legitimizing violence by depressed youth can be seen as a cultural shift in idioms of distress associated with pain and despair, just as, in previous generations, self-mutilation has become a challenge to security oriented societies [ 36 ]. The relatively smaller portion of minorities in this sample may also lessen the importance of discrimination as a risk factor.…”

Interrogating nonsuicidal self‐injury disorder through a feminist psychiatric disability theory framework

“…Steggals et al. (2020) attribute the increased interest in studying self‐injury from a sociological perspective not only to the fact that self‐injury is ‘a serious topic representing a significant public health issue,’ but to its theoretical significance—how the phenomenon of self‐injury demonstrates ‘how deeply sociocultural factors reach into the personal life of everyday subjectivity’ (p. 202). Most major sociological research on self‐injury has sought to provide explanations for self‐injury using non‐clinical tools; sociologists have focussed on the need to ‘demedicalise’ self‐injurious behaviours (Adler & Adler, 2007, 2011; Ekman, 2016), given that ‘self‐injurers are more diverse than traditionally depicted in the psychomedical literature’ (Adler & Adler, 2007, p. 559).…”

“…In clinical and lay contexts, self-injury is heavily stigmatised, commonly taken up as a maladaptive, morbid and pathological form of emotion-regulation, disproportionately plaguing women and girls in 'advanced' western societies (Gholamrezaei et al, 2017;Nock, 2010). While sociologists have begun to systematically address NSSI as a topic of research (Adler & Adler, 2007;Chandler, 2016;Steggals, 2015), even coining a distinct 'sociology of self-injury' (Steggals et al, 2020), NSSID and self-injury have yet to be examined at the intersections of medical sociology and critical disability studies. This lack of an explicit disability framework for engaging in self-injury is somewhat surprising, given self-injury's historical relationship to psychiatric illness categories and prevalent psychiatric symptomatology (Chaney, 2017), the chronic, 'hard-to-stop' and emotionally and physically painful nature of self-injury (Chandler, 2016), as well as the stigma associated with the practice, which is frequently characterised as manipulative and attention-seeking (Pembroke, 1994).…”

The personal is social: Four sociological approaches to nonsuicidal self‐injury

“…The next 10 years saw interest intensify (Steggals, Graham et al., 2020). Taking research monographs as a rough indicator: in 2011, Patricia and Peter Adler published The Tender Cut , which stands as the first large‐scale, fully dedicated, and wide‐ranging empirical study in the sociology of self‐injury.…”