Book of the Month September 2018 - Can I tell you about self-harm?

Can I tell you about self-harm?
A guide for friends, family and professionals 
​by Pooky Knightsmith
​
Pooky Knightsmith  is a mental health trainer and educator who is also Vice Chair of the Children and Young People’s Mental Health Coalition. She has provided an excellent and accessible book that helps explain the difficult and complex issue of self-harm among young people. 
She brings to this task her own rich experience that includes her personal struggles with emotional difficulties, including self-harm.  

She has also, however, achieved a PhD  in child and adolescent mental health  and is an Associate of the Evidence Based Practice Unit, a joint venture between UCL’s Faculty of  Brain Science and the Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families.  This short book distils her first- hand experience, her knowledge of the evidence about self-harm and her deep understanding of the potential damage caused by ill-considered controlling reactions and the result is a resource that should be widely disseminated.

The book is written from the standpoint of fourteen year old Asher. The text and the clever illustrations mean that Asher could be either a girl or a boy, allowing every young person to identify easily with the central character and preventing easy assumptions that self-harm is a gender specific problem. The illustrations and text make it clear that self-harm may affect anyone regardless of ethnicity or gender.

Asher explains why young people might hurt themselves, how hard it is to give up this way of coping and what friends, families and professionals can do to help. As well as helping people affected by the self-harm of others to feel less anxious and helpless, the book also addresses the loneliness and sense of shame that can be experienced by young people who self- harm. It provides practical suggestions for young people to begin to get control over their feelings and engenders hope that, ultimately, they will be able to find alternative methods of coping. Without ever advocating self-harm, it makes it understandable and also explores how to make self-injury as safe as possible. The language is simple but not patronising and the book explores a wide range of experiences and ideas in less than seventy pages.

Having read this book I will be incorporating it into any future self-harm training I may do. It is intended to be accessible to children as young as seven and its vocabulary and language construction certainly meet this aim. Yet, this book includes within its covers many of the most difficult and at times counter-intuitive ideas that still evoke resistance and anxiety among practitioners and managers in care, education and health settings.  It demystifies self-harm without normalising it and reduces anxiety for all involved, by providing helpful ideas for responding to anyone who use self-harm to cope with their distress as well as suggestions for helping young people to gain some control over their own self-injurious behaviour.

I wish every young person who self-harmed could have a copy of this book.  Its audience, however, should stretch well beyond this particular group of young people- their family, friends, teachers and any other professionals involved with them would benefit from reading this. Its messages that self-harm can be understood  and that children who hurt themselves need people to listen to them rather than to control them, are ones we all need to hear.

Judy Furnivall
Consultant
CELCIS
University of Strathclyde
Trustee of Scottish Attachment in Action

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