HOW TO MAINTAIN YOUR SELF-ESTEEM AFTER SELF-HARM | SELF-INJURY AWARENESS DAY 2024 | IN COLLABORATION WITH PINTEREST

To mark Self Injury Awareness Day 2024, I’ve teamed up with Pinterest to utilise their incredibly massive host of images in tackling the topic of developing and maintaining a good, positive level of self-esteem after having utilised self-harm as a coping mechanism…

This piece of advice might seem a bit surprising to be coming from me after my post a few days ago on their huge failings and my subsequent, resulting complaints against the Crisis Team (if you missed it, you can read it here). In keeping with typical I’m NOT Disordered’s fashion though, I’m going to keep this bit honest, open, and real and start this bit by saying that I 100% recognise that psychiatric services and the various professionals who can be involved in a mental health crisis, aren’t always beneficial with self-harm…

A LITTLE CHAT ABOUT SELF-HARM & ATTENTION SEEKING & A MESSAGE TO ALL THOSE USING THE TERM | SELF INJURY AWARENESS DAY 2022

Whilst I knew that I wanted to mark this Day, this post took a lot of brainstorming to decide on the angle I wanted to use. After a few chats with various people though, I finally came to the conclusion of tackling the subject of self-harm being dismissed as ‘attention seeking’ behaviours because it’s something that – having experienced the accusations myself – I feel passionate about. I don’t want this post to be a ‘rant’ about the judgment… More that it’s about me talking about my experiences with the label and hoping that what I have to say about this topic, has the gravity to make someone branding self-harm as attention seeking to reconsider their words and mindset…

My most vivid memory of being accused of attention seeking was when a very abrupt and grumpy Police Officer had detained me under section 136 of the 1983 Mental Health Act and was driving me to the 136 suite at my local psychiatric hospital. I remember her telling other Officers over her radio that I had been found and then she just glanced to me in the backseat of the Police car and said “why do you do this? Why do you like attention so much?” And I said, “why do I have a diagnosis?!” to which she replied “oh! I didn’t know that, sorry.” As though that little ‘sorry’ on the end of the sentence was an adequate apology for what she had said…