The Cultural Emergence And Social Construction Of Self-Harm In The 1990's

Self-harm (deliberate, episodic self-wounding, also referred to in the literature as non-suicidal self-injury) is internationally recognised as a major public health problem and is one of the most common reasons for hospital admission in the UK (Clements, 2016). While a source of widespread concern in the mental health professions, there is little consensus about its aetiology or proper care (Chandler et al., 2011). Depictions of self-harm in popular culture and social media attract controversy and seem to have turned a solitary practice into a contagion (Arendt et al., 2019). As a culture we have developed particular ideas about what self-harm means, who practices it, and how it should be dealt. This research will critically engage with these ideas and reconnect them with their historical and socio-political origins, so that self-harm can be better understood as a collective psychosocial phenomenon.
While the practice has a long history, self-harm only emerged into general public awareness during the 1990s. In this decade, rates of self-harm in the UK increased significantly: Hawton et al. (2000, 2003) documented marked increases in rates of self-harm in the UK during the periods 1985-1995 and 1990-2000. This trend has continued to the present day, with some studies describing a seemingly perpetual increase in self-harm rates (Carr et al., 2016; McManus et al., 2019). At the same time as rates began to rise in the 1990s, self-harm underwent a sudden cultural emergence via new representations in popular media. Its transition from obscurity to visibility in the 1990s was accelerated by an increase in depictions of the practice in media, and by the 'coming out' of many celebrities as 'cutters' (Adler and Adler, 2011). By the millennium, self-harm had cemented itself in the collective psyche and entered the sphere of available actions for the average young person in distress.