UK nurses want to supply clean blades and cutting advice to self-harmers

Britain's Royal College of nurses has proposed that mentally disturbed people who cut themselves when they are anxious should be given sterile blades and counseling on how to cut themselves safely. Cutters are a common phenomenon: predominantly people who cut their arms, bellies and legs with razors in order to numb themselves to their mental distress.

Emergency rooms see cutters who have gone too deep or given themselves infections, something that the nurses' association likens to HIV spread from dirty needles. The College is saying, in essence, that it can't prevent cutters from cutting, but it can prevent secondary harm arising from deep cuts and infection:

"My instinct is that it is better to sit with the patient and talk to them while they are self-harming. We should definitely give advice on safer parts of the body to cut. It could get to the stage where we could have a discussion with the patient about how deep the cuts were going to be and how many."

Every year 170,000 people attend hospital accident-and-emergency departments after deliberately harming themselves. A proportion of these do so on a regular basis, sometimes over decades. Many do so to release stress or cope with traumatic events or depression.

Maria Church, mother of Charlotte Church, the Welsh singer, recently revealed she has been self-harming for 17 years. When Maria Church is depressed she cuts her arms and stomach with kitchen knives and razors. She says the harm releases her unbearable tension. Dame Kelly Holmes said she went through two months of self-harming a year before her double gold win in the 2004 Olympics. She cut herself after injuries threatened to ruin her career.

Link (via JWZ)