Cutting the risk: self-harm, self-care and risk reduction

Davies, MN

doi:10.1054/bjps.2000.3521

Cited by 2 publications

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“…The activism of NSHN provides evidence of this presence: in 1999 they staged two Risk Reduction conferences in London and Manchester. These conferences were, as Pembroke (2007) remarked, 'important milestones in the history of self-harm activism', because they extended the scope of the public discourse on self-harm to include not only the professionals of the psy-complex but a diverse network of medics and para-professionals including medical students, accident and emergency clinicians, the British Red Cross and plastic surgeons (see Davies 2001). The diversity of this public dialogue engaged in by NSHN and others is summarized in their book Cutting the Risk (NHSN 2000).…”

Section: Questions Theory Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Cresswell

Brock

2016

Journal of Critical Realism

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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.

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Section: Questions Theory Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Cresswell

Brock

2016

Journal of Critical Realism

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Self-Harm and Medicine’s Moral Code: A Historical Perspective, 1950–2000

Cresswell¹,

Karimova²

2010

Ethical Hum Psychol Psychiatry

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“Deliberate self-harm”— acts of self-poisoning (overdosing) or self-injury (e.g., cutting) that do not result in death — has historically provoked a moral judgment in those professionals who treat it. Such judgments negatively value the act of self-harm and lead to the discriminatory treatment of self-harmers in accident and emergency departments and upon psychiatric wards. This article argues that the treatment of self-harmers in such environments has its origins in a “moral code” that negatively values the act of self-harm in comparison to (a) suicide, (b) the accident victim, and (c) individuals considered to be “genuinely” physically ill. The article fulfills two functions. First, it tracks the history of “medicine’s moral code” as it surrounds self-harm in the British context during the period 1950–2000. Then it turns to examine the ways in which patients groups — so-called psychiatric survivors — resisted such discriminatory treatment in the period 1988–2000. Such resistance, the article concludes, creates the opportunity for a democratic dialogue to develop between patient groups and service providers that could potentially ameliorate the deleterious effects of medicine’s moral code. The article’s tone is polemical and is expressly written from a perspective sympathetic to the political claims of “survivors,” which the authors conclude forms a central component in the development of democratic practices within medicine and psychiatry.

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Cutting the risk: self-harm, self-care and risk reduction

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

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

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

Self-Harm and Medicine’s Moral Code: A Historical Perspective, 1950–2000

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