Social movements, historical absence and the problematization of self-harm in the UK, 1980–2000

Abstract

This article engages Bhaskar's category of absence and Foucault's notion of problematization in the context of explaining an example of the historical emergence of political activism. Specifically, it considers the emergence of the 'psychiatric survivors' social movement in the UK, with a focus on the 'politics of self-harm'. The politics of self-harm refers to acts of selfinjurious behaviour, such as drug over-dosage or self-laceration, which do not result in death and which bring individuals to the attention of psychiatric services. For many years survivors have protested about the harmful treatment ('iatrogenesis') they receive from such services and have campaigned for their reform and for new, non-psychiatric understandings of the meaning of self-harm. The article explains how such activism emerged in the late 1980s. Its contribution is at the interface of critical realism and social movement studies.

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

“…Also in 2004, Barbara Jane Brickman wrote about entrenched gender bias in the medical framing of self‐injury and its continued influence in media representations and reporting. In 2005, Mark Cresswell began to write about self‐injury, though his work focused less on the social patterning of the phenomenon itself, and more on the framing of self‐injury in the psychiatric ‘survivors’ movement (2005a, 2005b; Cresswell & Brock, 2017), 5 in prisons (Cresswell et al., 2018), and in social policy (2020). And in 2007, Kay Inckle published Writing on the Body?…”

“…Given this, some, particularly in the psychiatric survivors' movement, have argued that self-injury should be de-medicalised (Pembroke, 1996; see also Gurung, 2018). Cresswell (2005aCresswell ( , 2005bCresswell & Brock, 2017) has analysed the testimonies of those who have received psychiatric treatment for self-injury, and the ways in which these personal testimonies (of both self-injury and medical treatment) function as a form of political practice which frames psychiatric discourse as an obstacle to self-understanding, and psychiatric practice as an obstacle to selfdetermination. As Louise Pembroke, a leading member of the movement, explains: 'I am a survivor of the psychiatric services.…”