Agitation rises inside a mental pressure cooker until the panic hits a state of overload. Fear, grief, confusion, anxiety, and bewildered disorientation - it throws the mind and body into a state of unbalance, a state of lost control. Lost control is a red flag to dangerous or frightening repercussions, real or imagined. One is completely vulnerable unless the panic is brought back under control swiftly; enough to allow clear thought and react with a calm mind in the presence of threat.

How can the victim of such overwhelming feelings quickly and reliably regain a manageable baseline emotional level, a level in which the panic is subdued adequately for the mind to once again think clearly enough to save the body should it indeed need rescuing from danger? Causing physical injury to oneself, enough to cause tissue damage, very rapidly controls what was out of control. This is the basis for self-injury.

In many cases it is a primitive coping mechanism to avoid suicidal intent. How do I know this? Because I’ve been a ‘cutter’ for years. I certainly don’t advocate self-injury and I do not encourage others to do it. I abhor the images freely available over the Internet glamorising self-injury. Believe me, there are many of those distasteful images out there. Self-injury is not glamorous, it is not fun, and it should not be splashed across the Internet as though it’s the mental illness equivalent of a rock star.

Self-injury is highly addictive and equally as highly misunderstood. There are cases of people self-injuring as a show of self-hatred and there are cases of people doing it purely for attention. What I’m writing about is self-injury used to save the mind from itself. Used to calm and rationalise, to flick the switch of suicidal intent off long enough to regain restrain and save oneself.

Anyone who self-injures, and has been ‘outed’ as a self-injurer, will tell you they’ve heard the following remarks - ‘You’re crazy!’, ‘What a stupid thing to do!’, ‘You’re only trying to get attention!’, etcetera ad nauseam. Even some so-called medical professionals have the same dark ages mentality. However you will find most who self-injure go out of their way to cover up what they’ve done and try to explain it away. ‘I broke a glass while doing the dishes’, ‘the cat had a tantrum’, ‘I jammed my fingers in the car door’, or ‘I burnt my hand on the oven’, for example. They’ll cover their injuries with a bandage and brush of any curious inquiry with a change of subject. This more or less proves the behaviour does not fall into the attention-seeking category.

So why and how does it work? I’ll speak from my own personal experience. It works by altering the mood and draws focus off the emotional stress by providing physical pain instead. There is a theory it releases endorphins, the ‘feel good’ hormone, and as such the endorphins can lower serotonin, the ‘not so feel good’ hormone. Higher levels of serotonin cause depression and anxiety; precisely the reason anti-depressants are serotonin blockers. The mind is a weird and wonderful contraption. It will attempt to save the body in any way it can, even whilst it is in the centre of an emotional hurricane. It will revert to primitive methods when it’s fully aware how rapidly it can gain results. Self-Injury is not a sign of insanity or psychosis; it is generally a clear sign of the victim trying to regain rationality. When we self-injure we know exactly what we are doing and why. We know it will work and we know we will get back to that baseline level.

Why not just have a good cry and get it out of your system? Why not have a rant and vent all the anger and get it over with? If you’re furious with someone, tell them! If you’re grieving, allow yourself to grieve beneficially! More questions and statements heard by those who have been outed.

Again I’ll speak from personal experience. Not everyone has learnt how to convey emotions constructively. Some of us were raised in an environment where expressing our feelings, be them anger, fear, grief, confusion, was decisively discouraged and/or resulted in consequences, usually some form of punishment or debasement. Sometimes this negativity came from parents, sometimes peers, sometimes teachers, and sometimes by all of those people. Rather than risk punishment or humiliation, we learn to bottle our opinions and feelings inside of ourselves and don’t dare uncork that bottle. If parents, or other close influences, were a poor role model in regards to handling stressful situations, how can a child learn the right way to cope when they become an adult? You cannot speak English if you were only taught Latin. Children are a reflection of their upbringing, a sponge absorbing all the information around them whether that information is good, bad, or indifferen