Amy Greeting Ms. Shook English Composition-4 May 25, 2011 Self Mutilating Self mutilation is a subject hard to understand. The boys and girls, men and women who self mutilate often do not understand their actions themselves. Self mutilating is their coping method. The way this method is learned is usually from the media. When searching for self mutilation related results the search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and the video based website Youth bring up many sites, and videos.
When innocent minds who are going through a rough time in life seeing one died, and the relief that the self injurer in the video gets while committing the act could alter their thoughts to think they could self mutilate and get relief from the pain. Self mutilation is a dangerous, painful task that many people learn from the media. Many people self injure themselves because of a pain. The profile self-injurer is usually a female, this does not mean that men do not self mutilate, but that a higher percentage of women commit self injury.
This statistic may be because many women think negatively about their bodies, and that the ideal women should be tall, thin, and beautiful (Pomes 28). As teens men and women equally injure themselves but later on in life when boys reach adulthood they grow out of it (31). As a self injurer their body becomes their opponent. Also a self-injurer does not want to kill themselves but they want to or need to relieve the stress with pain.
Many people who self injure have been through the following experiences; Physical, emotional, or sexual abuse during childhood, parental alcoholism or abuse by other drugs by parent’s, neglect or abandonment by parent, loss of a parent through death or divorce, tense or abusive relationship between parent’s, or pressure at school among errs (44). Most self injury victims share a multitude of personality traits, these traits would be; constant aim for perfection, dislike of one’s body, inability to cope with strong emotions, inability to release or express emotions to others, and frequent mood swings (45).
The emotions triggering the act of self mutilation are anger, rejection, failure, loss of abandonment, or helplessness (45). A self injurer wants two things out of there self mutilating acts; one is to keep the self mutilation a secret, another is to remain in control of him or herself (45). Another reason many people elf mutilate by branding, cutting, scarring, and piercing are because they are in a tribe. For thousands of years people have cut their bodies to produce scars (Williams 56). This cutting is usually for a rite-of-passage within their tribe.
In Papua New Guiana, it was common to initiate girls at puberty with markings on the abdomen. The first menstrual period was a time for cutting her under the breast and on the back. After a woman’s first child was born, final markings were made on the back, neck, buttocks, arms, and legs (57). Mutilating as part of a tribe is the way to growing wise and a way of being accepted. There are three deterrent categories to sell mutilation; these are categorized by the severity of the type of mutilation used. The first category is major self injury. This type is rare and extreme.
This includes castration in men and amputation (Pomes 10) and extensive plastic surgery. Michael Jackson is not alone. He is merely the most famous case of extensive plastic surgery (Williams 149). Potentially is the desire to be an amputee (150). In January 2000, Robert Smith, a surgeon removed healthy legs from two patients. This was not an error but the patient wanted this (150). The reason why he may have done these surgeries was because a person wanting an amputation can not be “fixed” by drugs or endless talking (150). The second form of self mutilation is called stereotypic self injury (Pomes 10).
Stereotypic self injury includes banging head repeatedly, eye ball pressing, and arm biting (10). This is often seen in mentally challenged patients, autism patients, and people suffering from schizophrenia, and trustee’s syndrome (10). The third and most common form of self injury is moderate self injury, this includes; cutting, burning, skin picking, hair lulling, bone breaking, and other ways that inflict self injury. During cutting a self injurer will either cut many shallow long cuts that cause bleeding and little pain or the injurer will cut deep short cuts that cause greater pain and bleed way more.
Objects used to cut include; knives, razors, broken glass, and scissors (12). Most commonly a cutter will have a favorite spot that they cut at, the majority choose to cut on their wrist, their upper arm, or their inner thigh. A self injurer that burns heats up metal objects and places the hot object onto the skin. Objects used would e; matches, metal wires, candles, and forks (12). Skin picking is what most self injurers do, it includes the interference with a bodies healing process- it is when a person picks at their wounds or scabs so the body does not heal correctly (13).
Hair pulling is also known as transformational, some believe it is a type of obsessive- compulsive disorder, or mood or anxiety disorder. It involves the plucking or pulling of hair from anywhere on the body (13-14). Many hair pullers make a pile of hair before they throw it away (14). Walls and desks are usually used for self mutilators who choose to break bones. Most commonly the bones broken are legs, arms or wrist. They break the bones by banging them repeatedly on a hard surface (14). There are many ways that self mutilation starts.
It is commonly triggered by strong emotional feelings. Cutting is an unhealthy coping method (Williams 23). It is sometimes (but not always) associated with depression, bipolar disorder, eating disorders, obsessive thinking, or compulsive behavior (23). Within a tribe the scarring that is left behind on the body is from many accomplishments. With on the scarring on one body it is like a language (57). Each scar in each individual place tells a story f great pain, endurance, identity, status, beauty, courage, sorrow, grief, marriage, puberty and death (57).
Among the Your in Nigeria, Africa, body scarification is an art form and ritual based on a proverb that ways, “Open your hand, here are lines. ” The lines provide Unusual identification and signify political allegiances or biographical facts regarding a person. Women have the most designs placed onto their bodies. The most common scarification sites are on the face, neck, chest, abdomen, back, arms, back of hands, calf or lower leg and thighs (57). Another factor that manipulates people to self mutilate is the media. When searching self injury in Google it yields over 15 million results (Purporting 11).
When using the same search, sell injury on Youth it brings up over 2 00 videos Popular movies, music lyrics, and music videos impose self injury in the writing. Self injury also exists on the news and on the internet (11). Prior to the sass’s non-suicidal self injury was rare in the media (11). The average adolescent is exposed to more then 8. 5 hours of media messages each day as a result of “media multitasking” (11). A good question is, are we feeding the desire for self harm by letting those who have it in an extreme form express themselves [on the internet] (Williams 153).
Simply exposing young people to self injury will likely increase the number who will consider using it (Purporting 12). Within the internet even on a Shawano High school computer brings up over 1 results. Within these results any child, girl or boy, adult, man or woman can be introduced to self mutilation in 0. 15 seconds. Another reason web induces self injury is the fact of unrealistic pictures that are put in the media. These pictures are the ones every girl looking at a magazine sees, because of this “perfect body syndrome” typically teen girls have self hatred or are self-conscious.
