We had a great response to SIAD this year and many of you have contacted us, letting us know what you did and how the information on our website helped you. Some of you wanted your endeavours to remain private, and we respect that and thank you. Others were happy for the events of yourselves and your organisations to be proudly publicised, and I’ve detailed below the responses I received from three of our dear members:

Kay, from Trinity College Dublin, wrote:

I have been inspired by your SIAD and this year I pulled some people together and had an
afternoon conference/seminar ‘new ways of understanding self-injury‘ to launch Ireland’s first ever self-injury awareness day. It went really well, it was powerful, positive and moving, and got an excellent response from the people who attended – made up largely of service providers – and also from the media.

I’m really hoping to build on this, a colleague is already moving on getting a ‘self-injury ireland’ network together which we hope is going to be the basis of doing some really progressive work and especially in realtion to harm-reduction/harm-minimisation.

I hope you’re day went well, and that next year we’ll have something bigger over here that includes public forums and really getting the message out there.

Take care and keep up all your work, and thanks again for the inspiration!

From Marjorie, the Counselling and Wellbeing Service Co-ordinator at Wigan and Leigh College:

Just to let you know that at Wigan and Leigh College we have raised awareness of SIAD and self injury in the following ways, over the weeks commencing 23 Feb and 2 March:

Made SIAD posters and factsheets available to College personal tutors for delivery in tutorials across the College. I have had requests from 12 separate tutors and 2 curriculum managers (who will cascade out to other personal tutors) who ran tutorials in this subject over the two weeks identified.

SIAD/FirstSigns website advertised on College-wide Message of the Day board – all students and staff who accessed the networked computers in the College saw this message as they logged onto the system.

Email sent to all staff (750) promoting SIAD and materials and website.

Displays of SIAD posters/factsheets and College Counselling Service within the entrance area 4 buildings of the College.

Intro to Self Harm Training for various members of staff.

Request to raise the issue of a Self Injury procedure for staff at the Safeguarding Learners meeting to be held on 12 March.

Suzanne from Bradford Grammar School wrote:

We have been talking to the Year 8 about self esteem and what might happen if this is slowly chipped away by various parts of your life – home, school, friends etc – what might the result be and they came up with various things as well as self harm – we discussed a range of harm – and looked at a range of other coping strategies and where to go if you needed help. The aim is to look at ways of improving self esteem from a young age to help raise awareness and opportunities for finding support early. We are trying to set up a rolling programme to do sessions with each year group. We also have a poster display up at least once a year.

We are based in school and are able to offer a drop in all day every day and in this way we can address the self harm issues (and many other problems) as and when the young people wish to chat about them.

Thank you so much to Kay, Marjorie and Suzanne for sharing their SIAD stories, not only with us, but with all our members.

Thank you also to everyone who supported SIAD and FirstSigns in any way.

“We’re talking about self-harm” – and it’s great to see that so many of you are too!