Self-Injury Awareness Day is on the 1st of March every year, as it has been for for well over twenty years.
SIAD is an international event that is recognised across the globe.
LifeSIGNS is proud to have supported Self-Injury Awareness Day since we launched in 2002, and we’re the number one resource for SIAD material.
Raising awareness about self-injury is incredibly important. Awareness leads to understanding and empathy, banishing judgment and fear, and reducing the number of people who feel alone and suffer in silence.
Raising awareness is about educating people who do not self-injure, and reaching out to people who do.
Self-Injury Action Day
Maybe we need to go beyond awareness and take action against injustice and ignorance, acting to improve the processes of our healthcare services and the empathy of our friends and family.
2023
This year, we have six messages and nine photo variants! So pick n choose, mix n match!
Save and share SIAD graphics
Two ways to save an image:
- Right-click with your mouse and ‘Save image’.
- Long-press on your phone.
Don’t do a screenshot – that’ll make the image smaller and lower quality.
The images are bigger than shown below; follow the instructions to get the full-size graphics.
Please save the graphics above and share on your networks and into groups. Save your fave images to your phone or computer to get the full-size file.
Self-injury and self-harm
"Self-injury is a coping mechanism. An individual harms their physical self to deal with emotional pain, or to break feelings of numbness by arousing sensation."
LifeSIGNS Tweet
It’s about coping. The harmful actions, the differences between self-injury and self-harm, are not as important as recognising that the person is in distress, and trying to cope.
There doesn’t have to be mental illness involved for mental and emotional stress to drive a person to hurt themselves – to seek relief and release from the distress.
Anyone at any age
It’s not a teen thing, it’s not a girl thing. People from any background or any age might turn to self-injury as a way to cope with overwhelming emotions. Read more about male SI, autism and SI, and a trans man’s experience.
Some adults discover self-injury in later life, while others return to it after many years.
Myths and harmful tropes
When you’re all alone with your self-injury, with nobody to talk to, it can be easy to believe what people say about you. Bullies use stereotypes to make you feel worse about yourself.
Read the myths – what would you add?
What you can do
LifeSIGNS can provide the resources and support, but we alone cannot fight stigma and educate everyone – we need your help. If you want people to understand self-injury better, then you need to do something, and we’re very happy to help you.
This year, we’d like to ask every single one of you to choose at least one action from the following list, and do it not only for SIAD, but for yourself. If you’d prefer to live in a world where people understand self-injury and don’t judge, where you can talk freely about mental health instead of being trapped in silence, then it’s our shared responsibility to educate our friends, family members, and healthcare providers. We’ll provide the resources, and we’d like you to do your bit by using those resources now.
Self-Injury Awareness Day can be an Action Day🎗️ – we ask all education and health care providers to review processes, service arrangements, training, and *attitudes*.
— LifeSIGNS (@LifeSIGNS) March 1, 2023
Smash (si)lence, smash stigma: https://t.co/7hb5Ww0WrJ#SIAD #SelfInjury #SelfInjuryAwareness #SHAD pic.twitter.com/YZxHgqVNqH
Quick SIAD list
- Subscribe to our newsletter – it’s vital we get organised! Standby for recruitment info.
- Follow LifeSIGNS on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram (and LinkedIn if you’re a health care pro of any kind).
- Download your fave images from the choice of 54, above. Share across social and into groups.
- Download our fact sheets.
- Share our pages and blog articles across social.
- Write for us! Contribute a blog article to express your experience, or work with us to create a reference page.
- Donate a quid or two each month. We are rebuilding our organisation and need your help.
Contact LifeSIGNS
Please donate each month via PayPal
We’re asking for a little bit, every month – to help us reinvigorate our approach to self-injury awareness and support.
Autism, emotions, and self-injury
Jay talks about his self-discovery journey from frustration to identity.
I wear many hats – nursing, teaching, self-injury
Leah talks about her teaching, nursing, and self-injury.
SIAD Self-Injury Action Day
Self-Injury Awareness Day has been going for decades. Maybe it’s time it became Self-Injury *Action* Day.
The next 21 years
LifeSIGNS is back, or at least we will be once we’ve recruited a new management team and redeveloped our approach to awareness and support.
We’ve been talking about self-injury since 2002
- Our founder wrote this Huffington Post article about his self-injury and… Self-Injury Awareness Day is not enough
- Our members helped write this Huffington Post list: 11 things people Who self-harm want you to know
- We were featured in the Huffington Post: Charities reveal gulf of understanding between parents and children who self-injure
- LifeSIGNS was in the Guardian newspaper: “Self-injury blights many students’ lives“.
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