|
|
Self injury When most people face stress, they talk to a friend or squeeze a stress ball. However, when a small number of people feel that their life is getting them down, they revert to dangerous behaviors in order to alleviate the feelings they are experiencing. These people, when under stress, may revert to cutting themselves, burning their skin, or engaging in other behaviors that cause themselves physical harm. Because other people view such behaviors as being very extreme, they may feel that the people who do them are merely trying to attract attention to themselves. However, when a person purposefully injures themselves, they are not attracting attention but instead are suffering from a disorder known as self injury. Self injury is defined as a variety of behaviors, “resulting in the destruction of one’s own tissue. These behaviors, including scratching, burning or cutting the skin, pulling out hair, breaking bones, amputation, and eye enucleation, can have a likewise variable assortment of causes” (“Definition” 1). Because of the wide range of self injuring behaviors, scientists have come up with three major categories in order to classify them. These categories are based upon “the degree of harm, the rate, and the pattern of behavior.” The categories are major, stereotypic, and superficial self mutilation (1). Major self mutilation include “acts that severely damage a significant amount of body tissue. These are injuries that can only be inflicted once, such as eye enucleation, facial skinning, amputation of the limbs, breasts or genitals.” People who engage in major self mutilation often have other disorders which cause them to recede into a “zombie-like” state that enables them not to feel the pain of such drastic injuries (“Definition“ 2). Stereotypic self mutilation describes “repetitive, sometimes rhythmic, acts, the most common form being head-banging. Other forms include orifice digging, hitting, throat and eye gouging (though usually not eye enucleation)...hair pulling, and self-biting.” The last type of self mutilation is superficial self mutilation. This category describes behaviors most commonly observed in people who self injure (2). Superficial self harm is divided into three subcategories, compulsive, episodic, and repetitive (2). A person who compulsively harms himself “unconsciously pulls out his own hair or picks at her skin.” People who engage in compulsive self mutilation harm themselves in a ritualistic way that is similar to the rituals in which a person suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorders engages (3). People suffering from the second subcategory of superficial self injury, episodic self harm, deliberately cut themselves, burn their skin, and prick themselves with needles. This type of behavior is what most people commonly think of when they hear the phrase “self injury” (3). People who engage in cutting or burning are often ashamed of their scars and hide them. Unlike the episodic self harmer, a person who engage in repetitive self harm harms himself on a regular basis and “with a sense of ceremony.” Other than this fact, the behaviors of the repetitive self harmer are the same as the ones of the episodic self harmer. In fact, a person can easily shift from being an episodic self harmer into a repetitive one if he self harms regularly and becomes addicted to the feeling (3).
|
