With 12,000 people attending Irish
hospital emergency departments in 2010 due to self-harm (Ring, 2011), it
is important that ways of alleviating its prevalence in society are addressed. Furthermore, it is believed that cases which present to hospital are only the tip of the iceberg. Unfortunately there is no panacea to ameliorate the suffering of the person who self-harms,
and it would be naïve of me to assume that the following principles alone would be enough to
suffice for an approach to understanding and responding to self-injury.
Nevertheless, they stand out amongst others.
The first of these principles is that 'the injury is not the problem'. You would be by-passing a host of problems if it was only concern for the person’s actual injury. Having an erroneous assumption that the injury should be the focal point of attention would only be delivering a lump of verbal refuse to the client.
There
should instead be a focus on their feelings before their behaviours. Most of
the 'problems' with self-injury are nothing to do with the person who hurts
themselves. While the scars may be psychologically detrimental to them,
underlying deep seated issues should be regarded as a lot more insidious. The
injury has to be viewed as an outward expression of their inner pain.
