My Silver Ribbon

 Yesterday the Bloggess made what may seem like a startling confession. She bared her soul and admitted to the fact that she self-harms. You may know it by another name: self-mutilation, cutting. What you may not know—what I did not know until today-- it that self-harming is not even a mental health disorder in the traditional sense.

I’m a big believer in serendipity. Have you ever had that feeling— where something you learn in one class directly impacts another class you also happen to be taking that semester, or how you overhear a conversation at work, and even though your coworkers know nothing about that problem you are having at home, their conversation sparks the idea that helps you solve that problem? It happens to me all of the time. The connections- the patterns- they are invariably made clear, and things fall into place and something momentous happens. Call it divine intervention, call it fate, call it whatever you want; it happens to each of us in our lives.

Serendipity is what happened to me today.  I’m participating in what we call mental health first aid training this week, while the students are still on break. I registered for it weeks ago. The training is completely sold out—filled with faculty and advisors who deal with students every day. This afternoon we spent time discussing self-harm, less than 24 hours after I read the Jenny’s post on the same matter.

Self-harm, again, is not a mental disorder. It can accompany a mental disorder (depression and anxiety disorders are common) but it’s not a disorder in and of itself. It’s not a life or death situation. If a student told me that they had considered killing themselves, I would break confidentiality and tell others on campus—like Student Health or the Campus Police. But self-harm is not attempted suicide. It’s not crying ‘wolf’. It’s a coping skill, a defense mechanism. I also found out that about 25% of college students participate in self-harm at least once during university years. Think of all of your Facebook friends that you gained during college, and divide that number by four. That’s how many of them that tried self-harm at least once. Many of them started earlier than that—as early as 8-11 years of age. Some of them may still be doing it. Most of them you would never even suspect.

People self-harm in order to stay alive, in fact. It helps them relieve stress and frustration and sadness and horrible feelings that they are, otherwise, not able to cope with at the present time. Physical pain replaces emotional pain. Individuals who do it can watch physical ailments heal—but you cannot watch emotional ailments heal. Still others feel numb or wooden, and use self-harm to reaffirm that they are alive. It may seem scary and completely outside of the norm. I know it was to me when we first began to discuss it. Then, I realized, it is like so many other tics that we all invariably exhibit when distressed. Toddlers pull their hair or bang their heads or throw a tantrum. Others wring their hands or twirl their hair or futz with their clothes. Still others have an extra drink or chain smoke. We all have some type of tic, some coping mechanism that we use. Self-harm is an exaggerated form of the normal human condition.

And it’s not all cutting. That’s a stereotype. Those who pick at themselves, those who pull on their hair, those who punch things—that’s all self-harm as well, and much more common than those who cut or scratch themselves.

If this is so common, then why don’t we know more about it? Why is there such a social stigma associated with it? Why is there social stigma associated with any type of mental illness, for that matter? Because we are afraid of what we don’t know, what we don’t understand. Right now, we don’t understand what makes one person get depression, and not the other. We don’t understand why someone gets schizophrenia or anxiety or seasonal affective disorder. We have some ideas, but we do not definitively know why, we don’t know how, but we do know what, and we do know when and we do know how we can go about fixing it.

The only thing standing in our way of fixing it for everyone is the fact that we do not talk about it. Those who self-harm are scared to admit what they do, and we are scared to talk about it for the fear that we would give someone else the idea to do it. We need to talk about it, however--the Bloggess’ follow-up post only goes to prove that. If we all talk about it—those who are currently in the middle of it, and those on the other side of it, and those who support friends or family members suffering through it… well, can you imagine a world where all individuals feel free to ask for help when they have mental or emotional distress? Where there are no suicides or violent crimes attributed to mental disability? Where mothers support one another instead of judging the one suffering from PPD?

I can commit to talking honestly about mental health until we live in such a world. I’ll happily wear a silver ribbon for mental health awareness and share what I can with anyone who will listen until that day comes.