An Article on the Elderly, an even more secret affliction?

http://news.scotsman.com/scotland.cfm?id=1147472006

It is nice to finally see an article dedicated to talking about self-injury in people that aren’t teenagers or in their twenties. After the repetitiveness of recent statistic laden, young person focused articles in the news, this article feels, finally, like something new.

Of course, self-harm among older people is not new. LifeSIGNS has long been aware that self-injury is not limited to any specific group of people, whether that’s old or young, male or female or any other kind of identifying factor. We hope that our website, message board and other services are accessible to those older people as other support available is mostly targeted at the young.

My fear is that at a time when self-injury has become something no longer unknown, when public attention is being drawn to it and the right kinds of questions are being asked, the topic has been swamped with news and issues about the “new teenage epidemic”. With all the focus on the findings of the National Inquiry and other studies focusing on younger people, I feel that there is a great risk of pushing the self-harm of older people further into the realm of taboo. I hope that there will be many more articles or follow up work in this area.