“Reaping the Harvest of our Self-Disgust”

Another two articles mentioning self-harm in the paper today (and thus another blog entry moaning about it). At least neither of them were going on about statistics, which, come to think of it, I have another argument about: what is it with the statistics that they are hoping to achieve? If finally they are satisfied they have done enough research and have a very certain number can they then judge and say it is a big enough problem for them to do something about, or will it possibly be that the number could be considered small enough that it isn’t worth worrying about? When finally one day they establish whether it is true or not that more girls self-harm than boys will that mean that what boys do can’t be called self-harm?

Oh but thats not what I was writing. Today’s two articles brought up self-harm in other familiar ways. One was a personal account opening with the line “I first cut myself when I was 16”, which to be honest has been the opening line of my own autobiography for the past six years (I’ve decided against writing it for the time being). The other article included self-harm in a list of symptoms indicative of some generalised malaise underlying our capitalist society – a theory I agree with to some extent, especially when you expand the definition of self-harm from our considered view of self-injury to include the excessive drinking and drug misuse of large numbers of both young and older people.

Maybe its just because I read the same paper every day that explains why I keep reading the same kinds of things. Please let me know if you have read something that truly is different, that doesn’t rely on shock value and doesn’t generalise it in a way that frankly makes me feel worse – if I self-harm because of the way society is then what hope is there for me?