LifeSIGNS Birmingham Meet-up

We’re meeting in Birmingham this Saturday!

Just for a social drink and a chat in the afternoon (30th June). If you’d like location details of Saturday’s Meet-up, please email me on Wedge@lifesigns.org.uk

LifeSIGNS is meeting in five cities around the UK this year, so we really hope to see loads of our members, it’s always a fun afternoon, and it’s great for the Directors of LifeSIGNS and members to get together.

Bring a friend!

The week after, we’re meeting in Cardiff, then, in July we’re meeting in Edinburgh and Leeds, and then in August we’re meeting in London.

Wedge
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Self Injury Guidance & Network Support

Your Art: Self Expression

Have we said how amazing your art is lately?

We're deeply touched each and every time you upload some of your artistic creations to us, and i'm sure our members and visitors enjoy seeing your words and pictures. It's so refreshing to see your honest self-expression.











See more on our Confessions / Expressions Board.


Wedge
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Self Injury Guidance & Network Support

London Nightline’s 35 Birthday Dinner

Nightline is an important student-lead listening service that many Universities run, and LifeSIGNS has always been pleased to provide self-injury training to Nightlines across the UK.

London Nightline is unique among Nightlines as it provides its service across all of the Universities of London, not just one campus.

I was very pleased to be invited to London Nightline’s 35th Anniversary Dinner earlier this month (5th June) and it was a great night for London Nightline, and a great night for my networking! (I always have a LifeSIGNS business card on me!)

I met up with Danny (former LifeSIGNS Director and former Nightline worker) and we got our poshest suits on. Reception drinks and mingling for a while, and then we were seated. Everyone on our table quickly made friends, and I was pleased to find I was not the only non-Nightliner at the table, as SANE had been invited too.

We had our meal and then David Blunket MP, Dr. Raj Persaud and Esther Rantzen spoke about their lives and their appreciation of what London Nightline has achieved and continues to achieve.

Awards for service and dedication were given out, and although our table was the loudest by now, two of our party were honoured with awards, so well done Tom and Andrew!

Oh, and there was of course the raffle, which I won, twice! When does that ever happen? Anyway, I gave the London gym membership prize to my table-mate and new friend Helen.

A good night was had by all (and a long night it was once we hit the bars) and if your University doesn’t have a Nightline, I suggest you contact National Nightline and set one up immediately.


Many thanks to Ellen and all Nightliners for their services to students; LifeSIGNS is one of the few organisations that London Nightline chooses to link to from their website.


Wedge
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Self-Injury Guidance & Network Support

Observations of a TV addict!

Is it just me or have you noticed the topic of self injury becoming more and more prevalent in the media recently? But increasingly it is cropping up in more and more TV soaps and programmes, potentially as part of story lines that attracted hundreds of thousands of viewers.

This week as made me think about the advances, albeit small, of society's understanding of self injury. EastEnders introduced a form of self injury in the character of Stella (Phill Mitchell's partner) who was shown pinching herself as she was crying, while tonight's episode of Casualty featured a story line involving someone who had been repeatedly cutting himself. But the interesting thing about these two portrayals was that they were not the stereo-typical generalised images of self- injury that the media and society in general adhere to. We are used to SI being associated with young girls, but these two cases showed how it can affect people from any age group - 'Stella' being a middle aged professional woman and the character in Casualty being a middle aged male night club door man. And in both cases, SI was presented as real, serious results of emotional distress, and not as 'something that silly little girls do when they get dumped', as was quoted in Casualty.

They show that SI can affect anyone, regardless of age, gender, profession etc., and is more complex than 'attention-seeking' and 'just a phase' that some people may assume. Obviously there is still some way to go in improving how SI is represented and shown in the media, but at least with these two examples, the BBC have thought that little bit deeper about the realities of self-injury.

BBC News 24: Self Harm

BBC News 24

Wednesday 4th July
Self Harm

There will be a repeat on BBC News 24 on the weekend.

At the moment the times it will be shown are not confirmed but we think around 5.30pm and then again after 8pm.

LifeSIGNS meets with the Minister for Care Services

Last Wednesday LifeSIGNS was thrilled to be invited to Whitehall, London to attend a meeting with Ivan Lewis, the Minister for Care Services in the Department of Health. It was a positive response to the 'Political Awareness Project' by myself and Nick which aims to get Self-injury and 'SI awareness' on the political agenda. And it was great that such an important and high profile minister was interested in finding out what LifeSIGNS was about and the issues surrounding SI at the moment, to have a meeting with myself and Wedge.

We brought to the agenda what we thought were pressing issues that the Department of Health could potentially help with. The first was in promoting our 'Schools Policy', avaliable to download on our homepage. It includes a guideline which schools can use to ensure that awareness of SI exists in everyone in the school, students and teachers alike, and that there is guidence in place for staff and pupils to create a supportive and compassionate environment for anyone affected by SI. It was stressed that such a policy needs to be in place to de-stigmatise SI in schools and to help encourage anyone affected to 'come-out' and get help.

One of the main points of the meeting was to inform the minister that for the Department of Health, the government and society in general to gain a better and more realistic understanding of SI, then there needs to be consultations and working partnerships with user led organisations and charities such as LifeSIGNS. The statistics used nationally are often distorted stories of the extent of SI - most come from numbers of SI related cases in A&E and GPs surgeries and many focus primarily on young people. It is organisations such as LifeSIGNS which are able to gain a better understanding of the existence of SI in the UK.

It is also common for SI to be presented as a precursor to suicide, the media and governmental publications often assuming that this is the case. As a result, we urged to the minister that it was important that proper training and a renewed emphasis on SI within its own category be emphasised. Although it is true that both are caused by emotional distress, that is where the link stops. Suicide is often caused by mental illness, something which SI can sometimes be associated with. SI is not a failed attempt to suicide and is not an indication of suicidal tendencies. And while the government has done a lot of work on trying to reduce the levels of suicide in Britain (which are apparently at their lowest) and there has been an increased focus on mental well-being, there has been little emphasis on tackling SI on its own. Its great that there have been some pilot and local schemes that have dealt with SI as part of the general issue of dealing with suicide, especially in young men. Yet we think it is necessary that SI be dealt with in its own category - SI exists, it is out there are for many it is a coping strategy. Dealing with it in the context of suicide can only have a limited and partial success - dealing with it head on and understanding the realities of SI through training and information, which LifeSIGNS provides, is the key to improving treatment and understanding within the healthcare profession.

Yet all this is not to say that the Department of Health have dealt with the issue of SI and indeed there are plenty of brilliant healthcare professionals out there. There are some specialist clinics throughout the UK, run by specially trained staff, which aims to provide treatment and support specifically for individuals who self-injure. One of these is the clinic in Eccleshill Community Hospital in North Bradford, run by Dr. Gillian Proctor, which LifeSIGNS visited in the first month it opened back in November. The NICE (National Institute for Clincal Excellence) guidelines also provide excellent guidence for healthcare professionals on how to deal with and offer treatment and support for SI. However, the key to the success of these is implementation, and this cannot be ensured without the adequate training of all healthcare professionals and raising awareness of everyone in society about SI, something which we were keen to emphasise to the minister.

It was great to be able to meet with such a high profile figure such as Ivan Lewis, and it was a step forward that he was interested and sympathetic with our causes. Mr. Lewis endeavoured to help LifeSIGNS in some of our causes and we hope to be able to meet with him again soon.

"Self-Harm - Self-Help" Conference

I spent Friday at a fascinating conference called "Self-Harm - Self-Help" in Lincoln, organised by Lincolnshire's Promoting Mental Health team. Apart from getting caught in what can only be described as a monsoon during my drive back to Cardiff the conference was brilliant and a great chance to communicate some of LifeSIGNS' thinking about self-injury.

I'd been contacted a few months ago and asked to give a short talk to "set the scene" about self-injury to the whole conference (about 70 people, I think), and then to run a workshop in the afternoon on a topic of my choice.

There was certainly a good mix of people at the conference - health care professionals, the police, the prison service, and mental health service users, to name but a few. Many of the people at the conference commented that it was the only funded conference on self-injury they had ever heard of - let alone been to - which serves to indicate the lack of training on self-injury that many people who come into contact with people who self-injure on a regular basis receive. I think the conference was supposed to be the first stage of a larger plan to engage with self-injury in Lincolnshire, which is obviously a fantastic aim. I just wish there was a larger consensus on the issue across the UK!

Setting the scene for the conference was challenging because the audience was made up of different groups of people, and I didn't know how much they already knew about self-injury. I think it went very well though, and I spoke for about 45 minutes about what self-injury is and why it's an issue that needs addressing. After finishing there were lots of questions, which is always a good sign that people are interested!

In the afternoon I'd been asked to run a workshop, and I chose to call it Why Self-Injury Works. At the last few training events I've done people have commented that whilst they understand what self-injury is, they don't really understand why people would want to injure themselves. The usual comment made to me is something like, "I understand what you're saying, and that self-injury is a way of coping with emotional distress, but to me the idea of injuring myself is completely alien". I wanted to try and make people who don't self-injure identify with people who do. In the workshop we spent quite long time going through the testimonies of LifeSIGNS members published in the Self-Injury Awareness Booklet and focusing on the "why" question. The workshop was very interactive and there were lots of different opinions being voiced, and we had a really fruitful discussion about the issues. The workshop naturally led on to a discussion of why self-injury is thought of as a bad thing if it's a coping mechanism, which again led to a lively discussion. It's a tricky question, but it gave me a chance to be precise that although LifeSIGNS recognises self-injury is a coping mechanism and respects people's right to choose, we are NOT pro-self injury and actively encourage and support people to move away from self-injury.

There were two other workshops going on at the same time as mine that I wish I could have gone to, one on urge surfing and the other on psychiatric first aid, both of which are areas I'd love to discuss and hear different opinions about.

The conference as a whole was a great opportunity to raise awareness about self-injury and about LifeSIGNS. All the LifeSIGNS leaflets were taken, and there was a lot of interest about the Self-Injury Awareness Booklet, the wristbands, the training services, and the website in general! LifeSIGNS was also given a very generous donation of £300 by the Promoting Mental Health team.

All in all it was a highly enjoyable and valuable day - hopefully there will be lots more like it across the UK in the future!

Recent Training Sessions

Tuesday was a new experience for me as a LifeSIGNS trainer – instead of talking to the usual doctors, nurses or other healthcare workers, I was talking to helpline listeners of a service provided to the armed forces, courtesy of SSAFA. I had never visited an army barracks before, or indeed been in any “army” part of the country so as we were passing signs on the way from the station that read “Tanks Crossing” and “Danger to Public: Unexploded Bombs” at the entrance to fields, I began to have a certain feeling of not being in Kansas anymore!

Still I was surprised when I got to thinking about it that although this training was taking place in a very different location to what we are used to – there was a chap in uniform on the gate holding a gun – what I had to say didn’t differ very much from what I would say anywhere. I’m sure that the military way of life is very different from that of civilians but yet the factors that contribute to the urge to self-injure are similar across the board, in particular a high level of stress, but also perhaps an inability to express feelings or fears.

I conducted two sessions in the course of the afternoon with two lots of listeners. All had received at least one call in the past related to self-injury but no one really knew that much about it and we managed to get a good discussion going about how the bigger problem is the emotional distress. At the end of the session I received a lot of positive feedback from them, that the talk had been very enlightening and thought provoking.

I have recently also trained a group of doctors – including consultants! – and taken part in a Expert Panel at a school parents’ evening. Every time people seem to be surprised by what we are saying, in that it differs so much from what they have heard in the papers and I try to caution them against believing everything they read about self-injury – while greater awareness is good, I believe that generally certain aspects are overemphasised in the media while others are totally ignored. One clear example of this is the surprise when I talk about self-injury starting later on in life.

We clearly don’t have the answers in what the best treatment is for people struggling with self-injury, or what the magic words might be on the end of a helpline. I consider the greatest benefit of our training to be the understanding that comes with education, and the way that talking about personal experiences helps people to remember things better than if they are just fed statements and theories.

BBC reports on 'shocking pro-si' images

The BBC is going to publish an article highlighting the disturbing images of wounds and self-injury that some websites and people publish on the Internet.

LifeSIGNS is not 'pro-SI' - we understand self-injury from the inside, and we recognise that self-injury is a coping mechanism, something that people come to rely on to deal with emotional distress and difficult situations. We don't tell anyone to just 'stop' but we don't promote self-injury either; we have a positive belief in health and happiness for everyone, and yes, we know from personal experience that it takes time, effort, energy and support to move away from reliance on SI.

Our recent Newsletter highlighted the balance between raising awareness, and promoting self-injury, or indulgently using sensational wording and shocking imagery. Considering the ease of web publishing, and the rise of social networking sites, it's quite possible to stumble across people's profile pages that show triggering images and videos.

The BBC will no doubt publish some triggering images of self-injury in an attempt to draw attention to how inappropriate some of these images are, ironic isn't it? Publishing images and linking to dodgy pro-SI websites in order to crticise them...

It's sad that the BBC isn't taking this opportunity to tackle self-injurious behaviour in a more positive light as well; while condeming pro-SI websites, it could also highlight the many positive organisations and websites that tackle the issue of self-harm head-on, like LifeSIGNS and our members.

Come on BBC, don't sensationalise and trivialise the subject like some glossy magazines, take the subject head on like you used to!

Training for a homelessness charity

I've spent the last couple of days in the valleys just outside Cardiff doing some Self-Injury Awareness Training with The Wallich Clifford Community, a well established charity working with homeless people in South Wales.

It's the first time I've doing training with an organisation like the Wallich, and I'd never previously thought about the connections between self-injury and other issues such as homelessness. The vast majority of the people I spoke to knew service users who self-injured, and apparently self-injury is very common among homeless people. What made me think the most was that, in the experience of the Wallice, most of their service users who self-injure are also misusing drug and alchol to cope at the same time. It led to an interesting discussion about why things like drug and alchol abuse aren't classed as self-injury, and reminded me how difficult self-injury is to define and distinguish from the issues that surround it. I'm sure there's interesting research to be done in relation to that.

Anyway, the training seemed to be very much appreciated and taught me a lot about an issue I didn't know anything about before. At the end of every session people came up to me and told me that I'd helped them think in different ways about how to work with their clients, or that they were suddently able to understand why somebody they know self-injured.

I'm going to a conference on self-injury in Lincoln next week so will blog again after that!

Nick