Mental Elf: harm reduction for self harm in adolescents

Harm reduction is an approach to self-harm aimed at keeping long-term damage and frequency of injury to a minimum, rather than at stopping immediately or completely. As such it acknowledges that self-harm meets a need for those of us who do it. Harm reduction exists on a spectrum from helping people to self-harm “more safely” by arming us with anatomical knowledge to limit the damage we do, first aid materials and/or wound care advice; to techniques like pinging elastic bands or squeezing ice cubes; to distraction techniques like listening to music or drawing on your skin. This study (Davies et al, 2020) differs from other recent work on adolescent self-harm (Wadman et al, 2019) in including views on the more ethically complex end of this spectrum, i.e. provision of anatomical knowledge for damage limitation.

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