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Self harm

What is Self-harm?

Self-harm refers to the different ways that people deliberately harm themselves. It might conjure up images of someone cutting themselves, but it can also include deliberate burning, scratching, hair pulling or taking an overdose. Sometimes people self-harm in secret and it might be a long time before they feel able to tell someone else about it.

People often think that the seriousness of the injury is a sign of how bad someone is feeling, but this isn’t true: a person who hurts themselves a bit can be feeling just as bad as a person who hurts themselves a lot.

Why do people self-harm?

When we feel low or stressed out about stuff most of the time we are able to find a way to cope with how we’re feeling. If we haven’t found positive ways of coping we might use self-harm as a way of managing the feelings that are bottled up inside of us.

Some of the reasons that young people describe include:

• To cope with overwhelming and painful feelings of sadness, despair and hopelessness.
• To relieve difficult feelings or to provide a distraction from them

This sounds like me - what should I do?

When self-harming becomes a way of coping with stress, it is a sign that there are problems and worries in your life that need sorting out. You might need someone else to support you to think about what is upsetting you and how it can be managed.

You might like to stop self harming but find it scary to think about, especially if you’re not sure how else you will cope with what is happening in your life. Stopping can be a gradual process – you don’t have to stop immediately. Some people find that it helps to work out other activities they can do instead of self-harming when they feel bad.

It can be a big step to talk to someone else about it if you’ve always kept it secret in the past, but sharing your worries with someone you trust can make everything feel more manageable in the long run.

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