Re-knowing self-harm: community and creativity

Self-harm is increasingly a common experience across the UK; however it continues to be poorly understood and responded to both within and beyond healthcare. Re-knowing self-harm responds to existing failures of care to reclaim and re-think the relationship between culture and self-harm through re-centring lived experience – moving beyond the quantitative, risk-centric approaches which dominate the field. Re-knowing self-harm accomplishes this through four strands of inter-related intellectual and practical intervention, which mobilise collaboration and innovative creative methods to impact care for self-harm across community action, healthcare practice, and policy. The first engages with and responds to dominant discourses of ‘contagion’, through a reflective reading group with lived-experience co-researchers followed by an interview study. The second strand uses collaging as a way of reflecting on, communicating, and understanding self-harm as a culturally-located experience. The third strand draws on fiction as a space for ‘imagining otherwise’ to articulate a new, radical vision of what ‘care’ means in the context of self-harm. Running through the project, a collaborative fourth strand will work with a Lived-Experience Advisory Group to co-produce the research and build meaningful cross-sector relationships. This will culminate in a series of workshops exploring implications of the research for policy and practice.