Learn about mental health conditions associated with self-injury and the types of self-harm.

Self-injurious behavior is common in the following conditions:

• Borderline Personality Disorder
• Mood Disorders
• Eating Disorders
• Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder
• Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
• Dissociative Disorders
• Anxiety and/or Panic
• Impulse-control Disorder Not Otherwise Specified
• Self-injury as a diagnosis

Self-injury Itself as a Diagnosis

Favazza and Rosenthal, in a 1993 article in Hospital and Community Psychiatry, suggest defining self-injury as a disease and not merely a symptom. They created a diagnostic category called Repetitive Self-Harm Syndrome.

The diagnostic criteria for Repetitive Self-Harm Syndrome include: preoccupation with physically harming oneself repeated failure to resist impulses to destroy or alter one's body tissue increasing tension right before, and a sense of relief after, self-harm no association between suicidal intent and the act of self-harm not a response to mental retardation, delusion, hallucination

Miller (1994) suggests that many self-harmers suffer from what she calls Trauma Reenactment Syndrome.

As described in Women Who Hurt Themselves, TRS sufferers have four common characteristics:

1. a sense of being at war with their bodies ("my body, my enemy")
2. excessive secrecy as a guiding principle of life
3. inability to self-protect
4. fragmentation of self, and relationships dominated by a struggle for control.

Miller proposes that women who've been traumatized suffer a sort of internal split of consciousness; when they go into a self-harming episode, their conscious and subconscious minds take on three roles:

1. the abuser (the one who harms)
2. the victim
3. the non-protecting bystander

Favazza, Alderman, Herman (1992) and Miller suggest that, contrary to popular therapeutic opinion, there is hope for those who self-injure. Whether self-injury occurs in tandem with another disorder or alone, there are effective ways of treating those who harm themselves and helping them find more productive ways of coping.