Abstract

This chapteSelf-injury, Medicine and Society represents an attempt to move past a position of shock and horror, towards one of intellectual and appreciative engagement with the practice of self-injury, and the social and cultural contexts in which it takes place and is constituted as a phenomena. Such an orientation involves not just attempting to understand self-injury from the perspective of those practicing it, but also to examine how self-injury is understood more broadly. To ask what cultural – including clinical – narratives and scripts people who self-injure draw upon to explain, or justify, their actions. A running theme, introduced here and running throughout the book, is that self-injury resists easy categorisation. At the same time, there have been, and continue to be, significant attempts to fix the meanings of self-injury, and these are critically explored.