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Anecdote is never the best source of evidence. In terms of credibility, it features lower even than ‘expert opinion’. Nevertheless, I have noticed, in conversations with colleagues (particularly those working with adolescents and young adults), just how frequent presentations of self-harm have become.
What seems evident from anecdote is soon borne out by evidence of a ‘harder’ kind. For example, an interim report from the National Inquiry into Self-Harm published in September 2004 highlights Childline's own records: an increase of 65% in calls relating to self-harm in the last two years and an average increase of 23% per year over the last ten. According to the Mental Health Foundation, in 2003, 24,000 teenagers attended hospital having deliberately self-harmed - mostly cutting, burning, severely scratching, biting, scalding, poisoning themselves, or pulling out their hair. Further, the Samaritans report that the number of young men presenting with self-harm has doubled over the last 10 years, while a YWCA briefing to the Oxford Monitoring System reported an increase of 70% overall over the same period. Whether these dramatic rises are due to an increase in occurrence or disclosure is debatable. Yet, whatever the reason, if the nature of self-harm were not alarming enough, the fact that those self-harming are, according to recent research, one hundred times more likely to commit suicide, forces the point even more sharply home.
In this context, Maggie Turp's Hidden Self-Harm: Narratives from Psychotherapy is particularly well timed and the surge of interest that it has stimulated amongst counselling and therapy organizations and colleagues (I recently witnessed a workshop she gave at a national conference where the numbers swelled from the proposed couple of dozen to more like a hundred) only too significant. The intense need (and greed) for insights into ways of working with ‘self-harmers’ is both apt and entirely in keeping with Turp's essentially object relations a