Introduction: Self-Harm from Social Setting to Neurobiology

Abstract

Abstract Self-harm is a significant mental health issue in the twenty-first century. The recorded rise in various behaviours, including deliberate self-cutting and self-burning, have been widely remarked upon and lamented.1 Eminent cultural historian Sander Gilman has recently written of a global ‘sharp public awareness of self-harm as a major mental health issue’.2 The behaviour is usually said to be motivated by a desire to regulate feelings of intolerable tension, sadness or emotional numbness, and is almost always reported to be ‘on the increase’; it is also often reported as a problem primarily affecting young women.3 Despite a steady stream of books and articles on this emotive subject from the 1980s onwards — from psychiatrists, social workers and sociologists among others — there remains little meaningful historical analysis of this phenomenon.