Safe with Self-Injury: A practical guide to understanding, responding and harm-reduction

This book is an essential resource for anyone who has a supporting role or relationship with someone who hurts themself, whether in a professional or informal context. It is also a useful resource for people who self-injure, to help them to explore their experiences and to keep themselves safe. Based on interviews with people who self-injure and frontline practitioners and service managers who work with them, it explores why people self-injure, debunks myths and misconceptions about self-injury, explains self-injury in the contexts of human embodiment and a social model approach to distress and illness, and offers practical strategies for responding in meaningful ways, including using creative practices and harm-reduction. A final chapter offers guidance on how to write a harm-reduction policy for self-injury that can be used across any health, education and social services setting. This is an essential book that promotes better understanding and thus better responses to self-injury, brought to life with the words of people with first-hand experience of self-injury, for whom it is, or has been, an important coping mechanism.The book closes with a short account of Zest, a voluntary sector organisation in Northern Ireland, whose success with people who self-injure demonstrates what the guidance in this book looks like when put into practice, and that it really does work.