ScattyCat
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Registered: 12-2005
Location: Cambridgeshire, UK
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 Help for self harmers...
Helping yourself
This section is about helping yourself to stop self-harming. Understanding why you do it. Stopping is easier if you can find other ways of expressing or coping with your feelings. To do this you need to try to understand what makes you do it. Lots of people don't know why they hurt themselves so it may be useful to think about:
What was going on in your life when you first began to harm yourself.
How you feel just before you want to hurt yourself. Some people find it useful to keep a 'mood' diary so they can write down their feelings at different times.
Are you always in the same place or with a particular person?
Do you have any bad memories or thoughts that you can't tell to anyone?
Thinking about other things
When you feel anxious or upset, doing something you enjoy or trying to think about other things can be a way to help you stop hurting yourself. You could try:
Phoning a friend.
Writing down your feelings in a diary.
Listening to music, drawing or reading.
Going for a walk or a run, dancing exercising or playing sport.
Counting down slowly from 10 to 0.
Breathing slowly, in through the nose and out through the mouth.
Focusing on objects around you and thinking about what they look, sound, smell, taste and feel like.
If you still want to hurt yourself try:
Finding a safe punching bag like some pillows.
Putting your hands into a bowl of ice cubes for a short time or rubbing ice on the part of your body you feel like injuring.
Using a red felt tip marker or lipstick to mark your body instead of cutting.
Putting a rubber band around your wrist and flicking it.
Putting sticking plasters on the parts of your body you want to injure.
You'll find lots of information on self-help books, organisations and websites in the Information sources section of the site.
Self-harm can be really hard to stop. It may take time and there are likely to be ups and downs along the way. Sometimes, however hard you try on your own, you just can't cope with your feelings. If you can't stop wanting to hurt yourself it's best to get help from someone you can trust. This means finding someone who you can talk to about your problems and who can give you practical help.
Getting help
When you decide to get help, remember you're not alone. Lots of other young people who self-harm have made the same decision - and many have been helped to stop hurting themselves.
One of the best ways to get help is finding someone you can talk to and trust. This could be a parent, grandparent, brother, sister, friend, school nurse, teacher, social worker, school counsellor or youth worker.
If there is no-one you feel you can trust at the moment, there are lots of sources of confidential help and support available. Check out the Organisations and Websites section in the Information Sources part of the site. Sometimes it's easier to talk to someone you don't know - especially if they've been trained to help.
What kind of help?
Start by thinking about what kind of help you would feel most comfortable with. If you’re not sure what you want, try different things until you find something that feels right:
Phoning, texting or emailing
Do you want to speak to someone anonymously over the telephone or would you prefer to send an email or a text? Two useful organisations are:
ChildLine
tel: 0800 1111
This is a free national helpline, offering confidential advice on all sorts of problems faced by young people. It’s open 24 hours a day.
You can also text them on 0800 400 222- available between 9.30am and 9.30pm weekdays, and between 9.30am and 8pm weekends.
Bristol Crisis Service for Women
tel: 0117 925 1119.
Open on Friday and Saturday evenings from 9pm to 12. 30 am and on Sunday evenings between 6pm and 9pm.
This is a national confidential helpline open to women of all ages. You can also email them at [email protected]
Self-help groups
Would you like to join a group where you can meet other people who self-harm?
Support and self-help groups meet on a regular basis. They bring people together to talk and work through their problems. You can find details of local groups in the Local services section of the website. Your school nurse or GP should also have information about local groups.
Counselling
Would you prefer one-to-one counselling?
You can get contact details of counsellors and therapists in your area from your GP or from the British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy website.
Health professionals
Could you talk to your doctor or school nurse or visit a drop in service at school?
They can give you useful advice on how to care for your injuries; help you to find further support; or, refer you to more specialised local mental health services.
Getting the most out of appointments
Appointments with doctors, mental health workers, or other professionals may make you feel nervous. It’s easy to forget what you want to ask or to come away feeling confused about what was said. Appointments with professionals can be very short, and sometimes you have to wait a long time to get one, so it’s important to get the most out of every meeting. You may find the following tips useful:
If you make an appointment to see someone and you feel uncomfortable going on your own, take a friend or family member with you. They can provide support and help you remember what was said.
Before your appointment, write down all the questions you want to ask and make sure they've all been answered before you leave.
Write down the answers you're given. If you’re given the names of other people or organisations, make sure you write down the correct contact information.
There may be a number of support or treatment options available. Explain that you would like to know about all possible alternatives.
If something is said during the meeting that you don’t understand, don't be afraid to ask the person to explain what they mean.
Ask if there are any leaflets or other types of information you can take away with you.
If the appointment is with a mental health professional or counsellor you might want to see on a regular basis, use your first meeting to decide whether you feel comfortable with them and whether they are someone you think you could trust.
If you don’t feel that you are going to get on with a particular person or professional, go elsewhere. You have the right to choose. What matters is that you get the help you need.
Don't forget, you don't have to take any help or advice if it doesn't feel right.
Getting confidential help
Many professionals, such as doctors, nurses, teachers, psychologists, counsellors, social workers or youth workers offer confidential help and advice to young people. This means that you can tell them things in secret and they will not pass the information on to anyone else.
However, in some situations, the law says that they have to protect you by sharing this information with an appropriate person such as your parents, guardian or GP. This is called their duty of care.
Duty of care applies to people of all ages but if you're under 18 your well-being also comes under the laws of child protection.
This means a professional might not be able to keep all the things you tell them confidential if they think:
you might be suicidal
you might accidentally harm yourself more seriously than you mean to
you might harm yourself in a way that could cause permanent damage to your body
someone is sexually or physically abusing you
someone is harming you in some other unacceptable or illegal way
If you plan to talk to a professional, and are worried about confidentiality, ask them about this before you tell them about your self-harm.
Local mental health services
Your GP or school nurse may refer you to a local mental health team or to CAMHS (Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services). Here you'll be able to see professionals who can help in different ways:
The team may include:
Psychologists - professionals trained in helping people talk through and understand difficult problems. They can help you deal with the things that are causing you to hurt yourself.
Psychologists may offer you a treatment called cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT). This involves doing practical things like keeping a diary about when you self-harm; thinking about what happens before you want to self-harm; and helping you to find other ways of expressing your feelings.
Community psychiatric nurses - nurses who can offer you support and practical advice at difficult moments as you work through the process of beginning to stop harming.
Psychiatrists - doctors who may talk to you about your problems or who can also prescribe drugs like anti-depressants which may be helpful in the short term.
Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS)
CAMHS provide a wide range of services that offer help, support and treatment to children and young people up to the age of 18. Like local health teams they have different specialist staff who can help with lots of different emotional and mental health problems.
Some of these services are based in GP surgeries, health centres or hospitals. Others are based in schools, colleges and universities or in youth centres, walk-in centres for young people and counselling services.
Local health services have different arrangements for the way their teams work. In some places you may be able to talk through your problems with a specially trained nurse. If your local team can't provide the help you need then ask for an assessment by a specialist service.
If you dont feel ready to stop self-harming
If self-harm has become part of your life and helps you deal with your feelings it may be difficult to imagine coping without it. You may not feel ready to stop right now. This is understandable as stopping will mean a big change in your life.
Until you feel ready to stop try to look after yourself take care of your injuries:
If you are cutting yourself use something clean and preferably sterile.
Never share needles or cutting tools with anyone else.
Clean any wounds, no matter how small to stop them becoming infected - just ordinary tap water will do.
If you think a wound might be infected - if the skin around the wound becomes tender painful, red or swollen - or an injury doesn't heal, see a doctor or nurse as soon as possible.
Even if you don't want to stop yet, it's important to try to talk to someone you can trust - friend, brother, sister, grandparent, parent, teacher, school nurse, social worker, GP etc. Any of these people might be able to help by listening to your problems and perhaps help you to cope with your feelings in a different way.
Getting medical help for injuries
If you’ve seriously injured or hurt yourself, your first contact with a health professional will probably be in a hospital A & E department or at your GP’s surgery. Such places are usually very busy and the doctor or nurse may not be able to spend a lot of time with you. The person who sees you will mainly be concerned with treating your injury, but it’s important that you try to tell them why you have hurt yourself if you can.
Some health professionals may be shocked or frustrated by your action if they don’t understand what you’re going through. They may also be unsure of what to do next. It could be helpful if you can tell them what kind of help you would like, such as someone to talk to or advice on looking after your cuts.
If you're self-harming but not suicidal make it clear that you're not trying to kill yourself. Health professionals sometimes assume that if you self-harm you are attempting suicide. If you have some idea of why you self-harm, or you know that certain situations make you feel like self-harming, tell this to the professional you approach for help. Tell them that you use self-harm is a way of coping but you’re unhappy with it.
After your injuries have been treated you may want to talk to someone else such as a counsellor or therapist. Most doctors and nurses have someone they can refer you to but sometimes it may take a while to get an appointment.
In casualty you will probably be referred to the psychiatrist on duty. Your GP or practice nurse may refer you to the practice counsellor or to your local mental health team.
http://www.selfharm.org.uk/index.php
Last edited by ScattyCat, 1/2/06, 0:38
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1/2/06, 0:27
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