Like
most modern mythology, society’s labeling of adolescents and young adults as
“Emos” or “Cutters” is an easy way to place blame and dismiss people who
struggle with self-injury. Contrary to popular opinion, self-injury is not a
modern fad nor a rite of passage for young people wishing to fit into a fringe
cohort.
Self-injury
has been around since the dawn of mankind and has been documented throughout
the ages ...
490 BC
The
Greek historian Herodotus, wrote of a Cleomenes, a Spartan King who was thrown
into the stocks after exhibiting strange behavior;
“And as he was lying there,
fast bound, Cleomenes noticed that all the guards had left him, except one, and
he asked the man, who was his serf, to lend him his knife. As soon as the knife
was in his hands, he began to mutilate himself, beginning on his shins.”
Cleomenes
went on to complete suicide rather than endure his imprisonment.
Unto the
Other Side of the Sea
In
the Bible’s book of Mark, Jesus is said to have crossed the sea to the land of
the Gadarenes with the express purpose of visiting a troubled man who lived
there. From Mark 5:5;
“And always, night and day,
he was in the mountains, and in the tombs, crying, and cutting himself with
stones.”
This
is the man who, when Jesus asked his name, said; “My name is legion, for we are many.”
I
have written of this encounter in a past article that can be found here. But in a nutshell, I believe that this
passage in the Bible is the first documented case of Dissociative Identity
Disorder [once known as Multiple Personality Disorder] where a person who has
endured early childhood trauma develops alternate “personalities” – or
sometimes strong ego states – in order to disassociate from the abuse they
suffered.
The Victorian
Era
The
1800s saw the beginnings of social awareness and curiosity about mental health issues
during the long period of peace that came to be called Pax Britannica in Great Britain
and the Gilded Age in the United States.
Physicians began documenting the behaviours of prisoners and mental
asylum patients in order to attempt to understand puzzling symptoms.
In
1872 the Chief Medical Officer of Chatham Convicts Prison documented 163
incidences of self-injury amongst the prison population that year alone.
Also documented in 1872, a female mental-asylum patient in Utica, New York,
stuck 300 needles into her body. This act, however, was not rare to the times …
The Needle
Girls
During
the morally strict and sexually repressive Victorian Era, a phenomenon spread
across Western Europe amongst young women – the practice of inserting needles
into their bodies. It would make perfect
sense that those young women would choose sewing needles as their tool of
choice to practice self-injury because as young women, learning to sew was an activity common to their upbringing.
Doctors
at the time had a name for women such as these - “needle girls”. The “needle girl” phenomenon was documented
in the 1890s by American Doctors George Gould and Walter Pyle who reported that
women all over Western Europe were puncturing themselves with sewing needles -
some embedding the needles beneath their skin.
The common diagnosis for these women at the time was “hysteria”.
Cutters
This
still often used epithet, is only somewhat accurate. Though cutting the skin – usually with a
razor blade – is the most often used method of self-injury, it does nothing but
label and dismiss the deep underlying emotional distress that those who self-injure seek to soothe.
What
the non-practitioner must first understand is that self-injury is most often a
way to reduce pain, not cause it. As a
very dear friend put it; “The pain is a byproduct”.
Self-injury
takes on many forms. In my own
interaction with those who are in recovery from self-injury or still practice
it, most give the age they started as some point in their early to mid
teens. Yet further questioning often
reveals that as small children when they were overwhelmed by strong emotions
they were sent to their room by parents who failed to teach healthy ways for
their children to self-regulate big feelings.
Once there, unable to calm themselves, they would resort to pulling
their hair, banging their head against the wall or floor, and even biting
themselves. These too are acts of
self-injury.
More Than
Human
Self
injury is not solely the domain of human beings.
_-feather_plucking.jpg) |
| Moluccan_Cockatoo plucking chest feathers |
Many
animals will display self-injurious behaviour when in a state of chronic or
acute distress. Birds are known to pluck
out their own feathers when experiencing the stress of captivity or isolation. Other animals have been known to self-injure
when experiencing acute stress by biting or chewing on their own limbs.
Horse
breeders and Veterinarians are well aware of Equine Self-Mutilation Syndrome,
where-in horses will bite their own limbs and flanks.
Macaque
monkeys that have been raised in laboratories have demonstrated that isolation
is a predisposing factor to self-injury and the seriousness of their self-inflicted
injury is in direct proportion to the intensity of a stimulating event.
In Closing …
Self-injury has been part of the human – and animal
- condition from the beginnings of time.
A conclusion as to why it exists can be stated by the over simplified statement;
“Because it works”. The myriad ways it
works will be examined in the next article in the series;
Previous articles in the Self-Injury series;
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