Making the cut

Abstract

‘Deliberate self-harm’, ‘self-mutilation’ and ‘self-injury’ are just some of the terms used to describe one of the most prominent issues in British mental health policy in recent years. This article demonstrates that contemporary literature on ‘self-harm’ produces this phenomenon (to varying extents) around two key characteristics. First, this behaviour is predominantly performed by those identified as female. Second, this behaviour primarily involves cutting the skin. These constitutive characteristics are traced back to a corpus of literature produced in the 1960s and 1970s in North American psychiatric inpatient institutions; analysis shows how pre-1960 works were substantially different. Finally, these gendered and behavioural assertions are shown to be the result of historically specific processes of exclusion and emphasis.

How Do Young People Understand Their Own Self-Harm? A Meta-synthesis of Adolescents’ Subjective Experience of Self-Harm

“…It should also be noted that several of the studies that aim to classify self-harm focus on repeated moderate self-harm as part of a psychopathological syndrome mostly in females. The act and gender seem intertwined (Ekman, 2019;Millard, 2013).…”

“…In the last decades, self-harm is more understood more as a way of coping, to get relief, and in accordance with the findings in my study, as a somewhat distorted way to get to know oneself. Although the cases of castration of limbs mostly included men and dominated the early literature of self-harm, the last years research in recent years has paid attention to repeated self-harm methods (Millard, 2013).…”

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

“…As a particularly gendered and racialised practice (Brickman, 2004), the intersectional dimensions of self‐injury bear addressing here. Although self‐injury is a widespread practice that ‘cuts across’ age groups, genders, sexual identities, racial‐ethnic backgrounds, and geographic locales (Adler & Adler, 2011), within western psychiatric discourse, the ‘normative’ self‐injuring subject is constitutively a white, middle‐class, adolescent female cutter (Brickman, 2004; Gilman, 2013; Millard, 2013). As such, much clinical self‐injury scholarship emerges out of the global north, with primarily white research populations (Gholamrezaei et al., 2017).…”

Teaching ‘small and helpless’ women how to live: Dialectical Behaviour Therapy in Sweden, ca 1995–2005

“…Linehan, Bohus and Lynch (2007: 583) describe emotion dysregulation as ‘the inability, even when one’s best efforts are applied, to change or regulate emotional cues, experiences, actions, verbal responses, and/or non-verbal expressions under normative conditions’. The idea that suicidality and self-harm occurs as a response to dysregulated affect can be traced back to institutional studies on self-harming female patients in the US in the 1960s and 70s (Millard, 2013). However, the idea of self-regulation of emotion as a desirable skill has an even longer history.…”