Is it just me or have you noticed the topic of self injury becoming more and more prevalent in the media recently? But increasingly it is cropping up in more and more TV soaps and programmes, potentially as part of story lines that attracted hundreds of thousands of viewers.

This week as made me think about the advances, albeit small, of society’s understanding of self injury. EastEnders introduced a form of self injury in the character of Stella (Phill Mitchell’s partner) who was shown pinching herself as she was crying, while tonight’s episode of Casualty featured a story line involving someone who had been repeatedly cutting himself. But the interesting thing about these two portrayals was that they were not the stereo-typical generalised images of self- injury that the media and society in general adhere to. We are used to SI being associated with young girls, but these two cases showed how it can affect people from any age group – ‘Stella’ being a middle aged professional woman and the character in Casualty being a middle aged male night club door man. And in both cases, SI was presented as real, serious results of emotional distress, and not as ‘something that silly little girls do when they get dumped’, as was quoted in Casualty.

They show that SI can affect anyone, regardless of age, gender, profession etc., and is more complex than ‘attention-seeking’ and ‘just a phase’ that some people may assume. Obviously there is still some way to go in improving how SI is represented and shown in the media, but at least with these two examples, the BBC have thought that little bit deeper about the realities of self-injury.