Joint project with

Preventing self-harm

Reading time: 2 min

Identifying people at risk and offering them strategies for dealing with stress.

Encourage family relationships. Build a trustworthy home environment. Perform leisure activities with all family members.

Encouraging social relations. Many people who self-harm feel alone and isolated. Talking to people who do not self-harm may improve social and communication skills.

Raising public awareness of the problem. For example, teaching adults who work with children or adolescents how to detect self-harm and how to help a person who may be self-harming. Designing programmes which encourage adolescents to look for help.

Supervise and regulate the use of Internet in teenagers.

Teaching adolescents to think critically about references to self-harm in music and on social networks.

What to do to avoid self-harm

If you can manage to control your distress without self-harm, it will be easier to avoid self-harming the next time you feel bad. To try to calm down without self-harming, it’s a good idea to:

Talk to someone, or if you’re alone, call or write to a friend.

Distract yourself by listening to music, watching TV or doing something you like.

Do something relaxing, like going for a walk, dancing, doing relaxation exercises, or squeezing a stress ball.

Finding another way to express your feelings, like drawing or writing a diary.

Doing a displacement activity instead of self-harm, such as rubbing yourself with ice cubes, putting a hairband on your wrist, or using a soft red crayon to colour the place where you would usually self-harm.

Each person is different and some of these strategies work for some people and not for others. You just have to try different options and find the right one for you.

It’s also possible that the same strategies won’t always work, so you’ll have to change them when they stop being useful.

What can I do if a friend or family member is self-harming?

It can be very worrying if a friend or family member is self-harming, and we don’t always know what to do to help.

What to do

Let them know that you care about what’s happening to them.
Talk about their self-harming calmly and without judging them.
Get information about self-harming and what to do about it.
Ask for professional help, and if necessary offer to accompany them when they go to see the healthcare professional.
Help the person understand the things that have happened to cause the self-harming.
Suggest alternative activities.