I’ve spent the last couple of days in the valleys just outside Cardiff doing some Self-Injury Awareness Training with The Wallich Clifford Community, a well established charity working with homeless people in South Wales.

It’s the first time I’ve doing training with an organisation like the Wallich, and I’d never previously thought about the connections between self-injury and other issues such as homelessness. The vast majority of the people I spoke to knew service users who self-injured, and apparently self-injury is very common among homeless people. What made me think the most was that, in the experience of the Wallice, most of their service users who self-injure are also misusing drug and alchol to cope at the same time. It led to an interesting discussion about why things like drug and alchol abuse aren’t classed as self-injury, and reminded me how difficult self-injury is to define and distinguish from the issues that surround it. I’m sure there’s interesting research to be done in relation to that.

Anyway, the training seemed to be very much appreciated and taught me a lot about an issue I didn’t know anything about before. At the end of every session people came up to me and told me that I’d helped them think in different ways about how to work with their clients, or that they were suddently able to understand why somebody they know self-injured.

I’m going to a conference on self-injury in Lincoln next week so will blog again after that!

Nick