I spent Friday at a fascinating conference called “Self-Harm – Self-Help” in Lincoln, organised by Lincolnshire’s Promoting Mental Health team. Apart from getting caught in what can only be described as a monsoon during my drive back to Cardiff the conference was brilliant and a great chance to communicate some of LifeSIGNS’ thinking about self-injury.

I’d been contacted a few months ago and asked to give a short talk to “set the scene” about self-injury to the whole conference (about 70 people, I think), and then to run a workshop in the afternoon on a topic of my choice.

There was certainly a good mix of people at the conference – health care professionals, the police, the prison service, and mental health service users, to name but a few. Many of the people at the conference commented that it was the only funded conference on self-injury they had ever heard of – let alone been to – which serves to indicate the lack of training on self-injury that many people who come into contact with people who self-injure on a regular basis receive. I think the conference was supposed to be the first stage of a larger plan to engage with self-injury in Lincolnshire, which is obviously a fantastic aim. I just wish there was a larger consensus on the issue across the UK!

Setting the scene for the conference was challenging because the audience was made up of different groups of people, and I didn’t know how much they already knew about self-injury. I think it went very well though, and I spoke for about 45 minutes about what self-injury is and why it’s an issue that needs addressing. After finishing there were lots of questions, which is always a good sign that people are interested!

In the afternoon I’d been asked to run a workshop, and I chose to call it Why Self-Injury Works. At the last few training events I’ve done people have commented that whilst they understand what self-injury is, they don’t really understand why people would want to injure themselves. The usual comment made to me is something like, “I understand what you’re saying, and that self-injury is a way of coping with emotional distress, but to me the idea of injuring myself is completely alien”. I wanted to try and make people who don’t self-injure identify with people who do. In the workshop we spent quite long time going through the testimonies of LifeSIGNS members published in the Self-Injury Awareness Booklet and focusing on the “why” question. The workshop was very interactive and there were lots of different opinions being voiced, and we had a really fruitful discussion about the issues. The workshop naturally led on to a discussion of why self-injury is thought of as a bad thing if it’s a coping mechanism, which again led to a lively discussion. It’s a tricky question, but it gave me a chance to be precise that although LifeSIGNS recognises self-injury is a coping mechanism and respects people’s right to choose, we are NOT pro-self injury and actively encourage and support people to move away from self-injury.

There were two other workshops going on at the same time as mine that I wish I could have gone to, one on urge surfing and the other on psychiatric first aid, both of which are areas I’d love to discuss and hear different opinions about.

The conference as a whole was a great opportunity to raise awareness about self-injury and about LifeSIGNS. All the LifeSIGNS leaflets were taken, and there was a lot of interest about the Self-Injury Awareness Booklet, the wristbands, the training services, and the website in general! LifeSIGNS was also given a very generous donation of £300 by the Promoting Mental Health team.

All in all it was a highly enjoyable and valuable day – hopefully there will be lots more like it across the UK in the future!