What is Self-harm?

Abstract

The disturbing effect of an ‘unclean spirit’ described in Mark’s gospel raises an interesting question of meaning and categorisation, namely the degree to which we can recognise here exactly the same pattern of meaning and action that we now call ‘self-harm’ or ‘nonsuicidal selfinjury’. As a recognised pattern and category of disorder self-harm is relatively new, traceable at best to the 1938 book Man Against Himsel. by the great psychiatrist Karl Menninger. However, the prevalence and cultural pervasiveness that self-harm has gained since the 1990s has, unsurprisingly, provoked an obvious question: has it always been with us and we simply failed to notice? Or is self-harm more a product and expression of its particular time and place?

And they came over the strait of the sea, into the country of the Gerasenes. And as he went out of the ship, immediately there met him out of the monuments a man with an unclean spirit, who had his dwelling in the tombs, and no man now could bind him, not even with chains. For having been often bound with fetters and chains, he had burst the chains, and broken the fetters in pieces, and no one could tame him. And he was always day and night in the monuments and in the mountains, crying and cutting himself with stones.

Gospel of Mar. (5: 1–5)