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Self-Injury, Biomedicine and Boundaries

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Self-Injury, Medicine and Society

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Abstract

In this chapter I present an exploration of biomedical ways of knowing about self-injury. The idea that self-injury is a pathological act that should come under medical jurisdiction has been challenged on numerous fronts. However, despite such challenges, biomedicine can be seen to have far reaching impacts in how self-injury is understood. More than this, medical knowledge shapes how we understand our bodies and our emotional lives, and each of these has been shown to be central in how self-injury is narrated, and experienced. By directly facing, and critiquing, medical knowledge about self-injury, this chapter seeks to excavate some of the numerous ways in which medicine has claimed authority over self-injury. At the same time, I incorporate engagement with long-standing resistance to such claims.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In the UK the National Institute for Clinical Excellence’s guidelines for the short and longer term treatment of self-harm include testimony from individuals who have self-harmed. However, their input is not uncontroversial, and Louise Pembroke—a particularly prominent activist and writer—has written powerfully of the challenges faced by ‘survivors’, many of whom were extremely critical of medical treatment of self-harm, of working with the clinically driven development of guidelines. Ultimately, Pembroke and some of the other ‘service user experts’ withdrew their support of the guidelines. http://www.soteria.freeuk.com/pembroke-jul.htm

  2. 2.

    http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://itriples.org/self-injury/fast-facts/ Accessed and cached 03/11/15.

  3. 3.

    Goffman notes in a footnote in the final chapter of Stigma: ‘It is remarkable that those who live around the social sciences have so quickly become comfortable in using the term “deviant”, as if those to whom the term is applied have enough in common so that significant things can be said about them as a whole. Just as there are iatrogenic disorders caused by the work that physicians do (which then gives them more work to do) so there are categories of persons who are created by students of society, and then studied by them’ p. 167.

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  1. University of Lincoln, Lincoln, UK

    Amy Chandler

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Chandler, A. (2016). Self-Injury, Biomedicine and Boundaries. In: Self-Injury, Medicine and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-40528-9_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-40528-9_5

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