Inviting pain? Pain, dualism and embodiment in narratives of self-injury

The social life of self-injury: exploring the communicative dimension of a very personal practice

This article makes the case for a sociological focus on the communicative, relational and interactional dimensions of nonsuicidal self-injury. While current research tends to be dominated by highly individual and intrapsychic models, it is increasingly observed that such models leave a social dimension to the practice unexplained. A burgeoning sociological literature has begun to address this paradox of the social in self-injury; however, we argue that the role of the social must be considered beyond the issues of aetiology, social learning and social construal/construction that are typically covered in this literature. Specifically, we argue that, since the lived meanings of self-injury directly implicate the interactional along with the intrapsychic, a more systematic focus on the role of social relations and social communication is vital. To illustrate this conceptual argument and embed it in the lived experiences of self-injury, we draw on two case studies taken from pilot research conducted by the authors. The more thoroughly sociological approach to self-injury that we present here offers an important compliment to the existing evidence base by reframing the absent presence of social communication contained within it, and suggesting important future directions for research.

Pain as performance: re-virginisation in Turkey

The literature on pain has so far been primarily interested in chronic pain, medically induced pain and pain as an unwanted experience. However, pain is a more complicated experience and the lines between pain and pleasure are blurred in different contexts. In this paper, these lines are explored within the context of re-virginisation in Turkey by taking to its centre the meanings attached to pain through women's online and offline narratives. Re-virginisation refers to the process women undergo in order to reclaim their virginity due to the expectation that women should be virgins at the time of marriage and to the persistence of the myth that virginity can and should be proved via bleeding during or right after sexual intercourse.Based on semi-structured in-depth interviews and phenomenological and post-structuralist discourse analysis of online data, I argue that pain in the process of re-virginisation (1) is desired and sought-after and (2) is a gendered and temporospatial performance. Within this performance, pain manifests itself as a functional experience as well, especially as a marker of having been operated on, of having had a successful operation, as a reminder of this operation, and finally as an experience around which a community can be formed. Although pain can be functional at most stages of re-virginisation, when, where, and how it can be performed is determined intersubjectively.

Survival, Signaling, and Security: Foster Carers' and Residential Carers' Accounts of Self-Harming Practices Among Children and Young People in Care

Research on clinicians' interpretations of self-harming practices has shown that they can often be negative. To date there has been limited consideration of other professionals' narratives, notably those working in social care. This article presents focus group and interview data generated with foster carers ( n = 15) and residential carers ( n = 15) to explore the symbolic meanings ascribed to self-harm among the children and young people they care for. Three repertoires of interpretation are presented: survival, which conceives self-harm as a mechanism for redefining the identity of "looked-after"; signaling, which understands self-harm as a communicative tool for the expression of emotion; and security, which sees self-harming practices as testing the authenticity and safety of the caring relationship. Through their focus on sociocultural narratives, carers position themselves as experts on self-harm due to their intimacy with young people's social worlds. This construction potentially creates distance from health professionals, which is problematic given the current privileging of interprofessional working.

Making Sense of an Unknown Terrain: How Parents Understand Self-Harm in Young People

Self-harm is common in young people, and can have profound effects on parents and other family members. We conducted narrative interviews with 41 parents and other family members of 38 young people, aged up to 25, who had self-harmed. Most of the participants were parents but included one sibling and one spouse. This article reports experiences of the parent participants. A cross-case thematic analysis showed that most participants were bewildered by self-harm. The disruption to their worldview brought about by self-harm prompted many to undergo a process of "sense-making"-by ruminative introspection, looking for information, and building a new way of seeing-to understand and come to terms with self-harm. Most participants appeared to have been successful in making sense of self-harm, though not without considerable effort and emotional struggle. Our findings provide grounds for a deeper socio-cultural understanding of the impact of self-harm on parents.

Narrating the self-injured body

Illness narratives have traditionally been used as a conceptual tool for exploring experiences of chronic illness or disease. In this paper, I suggest that Frank's typology of illness narratives (chaos, restitution and quest) also offers an illuminating approach to analysing accounts of self-injury, demonstrating the diverse ways in which self-injury is practiced, experienced and narrated. Drawing on 24 narrative interviews with 12 people who had self-injured, I focus on participants' accounts of their self-injured bodies. The approach is phenomenological, and concerned with talk about the experience of living with and in a body that has been marked by self-injury. Thus, the act of self-injury is not the sole focus, and particular attention is paid to accounts of the bodily aftermath: scars, marks and wounds. Scars left by self-injury can be seen as communicative, and the analysis developed here demonstrates some of the various ways that these marks may be read. Attending to these diverse narratives can contribute to the provision of compassionate, non-judgemental care for patients who have self-injured. Further, highlighting the existence of different ways of narrating the self-injured body may offer an optimistic resource for people who have self-injured.