Last Wednesday LifeSIGNS was thrilled to be invited to Whitehall, London to attend a meeting with Ivan Lewis, the Minister for Care Services in the Department of Health. It was a positive response to the ‘Political Awareness Project’ by myself and Nick which aims to get Self-injury and ‘SI awareness’ on the political agenda. And it was great that such an important and high profile minister was interested in finding out what LifeSIGNS was about and the issues surrounding SI at the moment, to have a meeting with myself and Wedge.

We brought to the agenda what we thought were pressing issues that the Department of Health could potentially help with. The first was in promoting our ‘Schools Policy’, avaliable to download on our homepage. It includes a guideline which schools can use to ensure that awareness of SI exists in everyone in the school, students and teachers alike, and that there is guidence in place for staff and pupils to create a supportive and compassionate environment for anyone affected by SI. It was stressed that such a policy needs to be in place to de-stigmatise SI in schools and to help encourage anyone affected to ‘come-out’ and get help.

One of the main points of the meeting was to inform the minister that for the Department of Health, the government and society in general to gain a better and more realistic understanding of SI, then there needs to be consultations and working partnerships with user led organisations and charities such as LifeSIGNS. The statistics used nationally are often distorted stories of the extent of SI – most come from numbers of SI related cases in A&E and GPs surgeries and many focus primarily on young people. It is organisations such as LifeSIGNS which are able to gain a better understanding of the existence of SI in the UK.

It is also common for SI to be presented as a precursor to suicide, the media and governmental publications often assuming that this is the case. As a result, we urged to the minister that it was important that proper training and a renewed emphasis on SI within its own category be emphasised. Although it is true that both are caused by emotional distress, that is where the link stops. Suicide is often caused by mental illness, something which SI can sometimes be associated with. SI is not a failed attempt to suicide and is not an indication of suicidal tendencies. And while the government has done a lot of work on trying to reduce the levels of suicide in Britain (which are apparently at their lowest) and there has been an increased focus on mental well-being, there has been little emphasis on tackling SI on its own. Its great that there have been some pilot and local schemes that have dealt with SI as part of the general issue of dealing with suicide, especially in young men. Yet we think it is necessary that SI be dealt with in its own category – SI exists, it is out there are for many it is a coping strategy. Dealing with it in the context of suicide can only have a limited and partial success – dealing with it head on and understanding the realities of SI through training and information, which LifeSIGNS provides, is the key to improving treatment and understanding within the healthcare profession.

Yet all this is not to say that the Department of Health have dealt with the issue of SI and indeed there are plenty of brilliant healthcare professionals out there. There are some specialist clinics throughout the UK, run by specially trained staff, which aims to provide treatment and support specifically for individuals who self-injure. One of these is the clinic in Eccleshill Community Hospital in North Bradford, run by Dr. Gillian Proctor, which LifeSIGNS visited in the first month it opened back in November. The NICE (National Institute for Clincal Excellence) guidelines also provide excellent guidence for healthcare professionals on how to deal with and offer treatment and support for SI. However, the key to the success of these is implementation, and this cannot be ensured without the adequate training of all healthcare professionals and raising awareness of everyone in society about SI, something which we were keen to emphasise to the minister.

It was great to be able to meet with such a high profile figure such as Ivan Lewis, and it was a step forward that he was interested and sympathetic with our causes. Mr. Lewis endeavoured to help LifeSIGNS in some of our causes and we hope to be able to meet with him again soon.