1. Self-Harm: The Perceived Comedy and the Genuine Reality
By KATIE TAMOLA
Lyla Meritt* fastened on her custom-fitted cherry-colored nose. She chalked her
ivory skin with a pallid, chunky make-up, and transformed her cheeks into circular
scarlet patches of blush.
With grossly oversized, red, Ronald McDonald-esque shoes, once Meritt waddles
through the doors of Boston Children’s Hospital, she is no longer Lyla.
She is Tutti Fruiti.
Tutti Fruiti is the uproarious and theatrical clown, sent to make severely burned
children smile. Tutti Fruiti has not walked into a hospital in a few years, as she has
taken time to receive a college education.
Meritt is 21-years-old and hails from Seymour, Connecticut. She studies Counseling
and Human Services at a Jesuit university in Pennsylvania. Wherever she is, she is
usually found laughing. And Meritt brings humor with her wherever she goes, sort
of a contagious condition that she passes on to all around her.
However, the laughter and clowning around mask a dark reality. Lyla Meritt has a
history of cutting herself.

2. Meritt, and the millions of others, who have self-injured have experienced vastly
different provocations for self-harm as well as disparate setbacks and triumphs in
their everyday lives. Interviews with psychologists, researchers, and those who have
hurt themselves reveal that there is no specific prototype of a person who self-
harms.
As someone who has experienced self-harm, Meritt is unusual only in that she
agreed to discuss a habit that much of society finds repellent and perplexing. What
prompts two million Americans, mostly young men and women, to slice into their
own bodies, drawing blood and leaving tattletale scars? The phenomenon carries
with it a certain perverse fascination. Those who harm themselves add a gore factor
that seems irresistible to producers of contemporary drama. Self-harm stands right
alongside mental health as a target for sharp-tongued humor.
Self-harm has become a frequent comedic device for the media. The notion of actual
people sawing into themselves is a surefire shocker or attention-grabber designed
to appeal to an audience’s thirst for horror. This approach also plays to a sense of
schadenfreude, or relief that whatever is happening on screen is not happening to
the audience itself.
Especially in television aimed at young audiences, schizophrenia has been turned
into a pathetic kind of laugh line. Many producers also find the use of psychotropic

3. drugs and mood stabilizers comical. Even at its nadir of bad taste, television knows
better than to make fun of genuine physical conditions. However, psychological
issues get no such exemption, and cutting seems to be at the very top of the laugh-
line list.
Television
TV Guide reports that The Big Bang Theory is currently the most watched television
show in the United States.
The show follows a group of friends, six of whom are scientists, and one who is an
aspiring actress. The Big Bang Theory is a culmination of romantic tribulations, the
scientists’ passion for all things science and comic book related, and daily mishaps
of any group of twenty somethings.
The show highlights the friend-group’s unconventional and quirky nature, and
harps on the idea that the group of scientists is eccentric, far outside society’s idea of
“popular,” or “cool.” This is highlighted whenever one of the scientists attempts to
date someone and is quickly dismissed “geeky” or a “weirdo.” For several seasons,
one of the comedic plots of the show is one of the characters having such severe
anxiety that he physically cannot speak to or with any woman.

4. Viewers, particularly Lyla Meritt, could empathize with the scientists lacking a
feeling of conventional belonging.
“My brother and sister were 6 and 7 years older than me. Growing up, I was always
overshadowed..my designated spot was in a crowd or in the back of a van,” she said.
Maybe this is why Meritt loves The Big Bang Theory, referring to the show as “the
best show ever.”
Television, in particular, summons self-harm as a sort of quick and passive laugh
line.
On February 3, 2011, episode 14 of the fourth season of The Big Bang Theory,
Sheldon guest-lectures a class, and his friends begin to analyze students’ feedback
on his teaching via Twitter.
“Listening to Dr. Cooper makes me want to start cutting myself again,” one student
tweets.
A laugh track immediately follows this throwaway comment.
“I don’t recall seeing any shows that talk about cutting. But if I were to hear that, it
would feel like someone stabbing me…and I think I would shut down and stay quiet.

5. I would feel targeted and uncomfortable,” Meritt said, when asked if she had ever
seen that episode of one of her favorite shows.
Meritt cut herself for the first time at age 15. She said that several factors, including
feeling as though she lacked a sense of identity and attention from her family, led
her to self-harm.
But there was also a specific catalyst that led to her first cutting episode. Meritt’s
first cutting experience occurred after being continually sexually assaulted by a co-
worker.
“When I was 15, I was molested for over six months by a chef at a restaurant I
worked at. When I told my brother, he didn’t believe me. I then was ashamed of
myself for opening my “’big’” mouth,” she recalled.
For Meritt, cutting began with breaking pens in half and using the sharp ends of the
fragmented pens to slice her wrists.
“I did this because it was easy to throw out in my garbage without any suspicion
from my parents. When the pen wasn’t doing any justice for me, not releasing
enough pain, I went to razors,” she explained.

6. Meritt soon graduated to shower razors, betaking them to obtain single blades. She
said she then “upgraded” to using her father’s knives from his workshop.
Meritt would cut her wrists, and also occasionally burn her arms with cigarettes “to
get a different sense of pain.” She said cutting her wrists was too visible, conveying
that she “was just asking to get caught.” So she then began to cut her legs, which
ultimately led her to primarily cutting her hips.
Meritt says that she hasn’t cut herself since May of 2013. Now, when she feels the
urge to cut, she said she seeks help from counselors and close friends.
“I ask for help and I ask for support. Luckily, I have a great support system who
understands. I think support systems are the most important thing everyone should
invest in,” she said.
Meritt attended weekly counseling sessions with a school counselor during her first
two years at college. She says she also keeps what she calls an affirmation journal
that helps her to make sense of especially challenging days.
“When I have a bad day I write [down] what I am blessed with. The reason I do this
is to remind myself how thankful I am to live that day,” she said.

7. Meritt also expressed what she believes to be an important aspect of dealing with
self-harm: talking about self-harm.
“I think it’s important to talk to various people who experience the pain of self
harm,” Meritt said.
The laugh tracks do not begin and end with The Big Bang Theory.
In episode 20 of season three of MTV’s Awkward, Ming is worried that her boyfriend,
Fred, has certain sexual expectations for their prom night. Ming invites Fred to
dinner with her parents, hoping to make him appear so unattractive that her
parents will not allow her to go to the prom.
During dinner, Ming nonchalantly notes that Fred receives mediocre grades, accuses
him of making a pass at her mom, and mentions his plans for art school. Fred
frantically pulls her aside.
“What are you going to tell them next…that I’m a cutter?” Fred exclaims.
Ming’s face then lights up and she exclaims, “Are you?!”
With high school students as main characters, this show has a very young audience.
The message Awkward offered young people: You can’t bring a cutter home. Cutting
is parental and romantic kryptonite.

8. Another show with a large young adult viewership, Family Guy, featured an episode
called “Sibling Rivalry,” where Meg has an argument with her mother Lois. Lois has
noticed that Meg has been eating more than usual.
Lois then says, “Eating is not the way to solve your problems. You hear that, Meg?
“For your information, Mom, I don’t eat to solve my problems. I cut myself. Is that
better?” Meg responds.
Just eight episodes prior, a “Family Guy” episode called “Brian Goes Back to College”
aired. Brian’s roommate was labeled a “Goth,” who said he enjoyed cutting himself.
Methods and Statistics
Mental Health America, a community-based network, reports that an estimated two
million Americans self-injure in some way. The Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention note that the greatest percentage of non-fatal self-harm injuries
occurred by poisoning including consuming illegal or non-prescribed drugs. The
CDC ranked cutting/piercing as the second greatest percentage.
In an interview at her Harvard office, Catherine Glenn, postdoctoral fellow at
Harvard University’s Laboratory for Clinical and Developmental Research, discussed

9. the complexities of deciphering the most widely used self-harm method in the
country. Glenn works under Matthew K. Nock, a leading expert on self-injury.
“[The method] depends on the sample. Most individuals who engage in self-injury
report that they engage in multiple methods over the course of their lifetimes. It
may start with one and then morph into other things,” Glenn said.
Glenn also said gender differences can account for different methods.
“Sometimes people will just assess for skin cutting—in that case, you do tend to
pretty reliably get higher rates among females, if you broadened that criterion,
[meaning] the class of behaviors you’re asking about, you do tend to see higher rates
in some samples with boys with hitting and burning,” she said.
Glenn continued, saying “the evidence is still pretty mixed,” and that experts do not
have a great deal of large-scale epidemiological, nationally representative sample
data.
One reason there is so little data, Glenn said, is that until recently, the Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders listed self-injury only as a symptom of
borderline personality disorder.
“The DSM fuels a lot of what people focus on in research and treatment,” Glenn said.

10. She also said that the newest edition, DSM 5, is the first version not to list self-injury
as only a symptom of borderline personality disorder. She then explained that only
in the last decade have psychologists significantly increased their research into self-
injury.
“In the most recent version of the DSM, there’s a nonsuicidal self-injury disorder as a
condition requiring further study. So it’s not technically in the DSM, but it’s in the
DSM sort of in an appendix, sort of in a way that it suggested that people start
assessing [self-injury] independent of BPD,” Glenn said.
The History of Self-Harm
In “Self-Injury: History & Nature,” Registered Professional Counselor Aaron D.
McClelland discusses the first recorded instances of self-harm.
Cleomenes, a Spartan King who lived around 490 BC, reportedly borrowed a knife
from a serf after being put in a holding cell for “exhibiting strange behavior.”
Cleomenes then used the serf’s knife to mutilate himself. He then killed himself.
McClelland also notes that in chapter five, verse five of the book of Mark of the Bible,
Jesus encounters a man who is seen to be “cutting himself with stones.”

11. The 1800s witnessed a spur of self-injury. McClelland writes that in 1872, the chief
Medical officer of Chatham Convicts prison documented 163 incidences of self-
injury among the prison population during that year.
Then, during the Victorian Era, a group known as “The Needle Girls” emerged. This
group of women would use sewing needles to repeatedly puncture their bodies.
Doctors diagnosed these women as having “hysteria.”
Barry Walsh has served as the executive director of The Bridge of Central
Massachusetts, a human services agency that provides mental health counseling and
other services, since 1997.
Walsh explained in an interview that the psychological literature regarding self-
harm “really took off” in the 1950s and 1960s in the form of publications.
In the 1970s, Walsh grew interested with the topic.
“I was working at a state hospital and I was encountering people who were cutting
themselves and doing other forms of self injury, and that was fairly striking and I
wanted to try to understand it,” he said.
Walsh entered a PhD program at Boston College in the ‘80s, and selected self-harm
as his dissertation topic, as he found it “so complicated and interesting.”

12. The Guilford Press published Walsh’s first book, Treating Self Mutilation, in 1988.
Walsh explained how self-harm changed shortly after the book release.
“My book was one of the first books, in the late 80s, then self injury changed, back
then it was called self-mutilation. Self-injury changed in the mid ‘90s and moving
forward,” he said.
Self-harm, Walsh said, shifted and grew more widespread.
“It started being common in the general population, middle schools, high schools,
and colleges, whereas previously self-injury had been largely confined to clinical
populations where people were getting pretty intensive treatments such as in-
patient psych units, or group homes, or special ed. schools,” Walsh said.
Walsh also said self-injury is now prevalent in the general population, adding that
the population group known as Millennials experience greater stress than in the
past. Social media may also be a factor, he said.
“Another influence has been the internet and the explosion of information and
content and websites and chat rooms and message boards devoted to self injury,
many of which have a lot of triggering content,” Walsh said.

13. Walsh added that self-injury is a global phenomenon and that countries such as The
United Kingdom, The United States, France, Japan, Germany, Switzerland, and
Canada, have prominent self-injury recovery programs. Developing nations, he said,
were less likely to have these programs.
Why Self-Injury?
“Self injury is not the problem. I want to repeat that. Self injury is not the problem,
it’s just the symptom of something else,” Michelle Seliner said in an interview.
Seliner is the Chief Operating Officer of S.A.F.E (Self Abuse Finally Ends)
Alternatives, a treatment program in Missouri that sees those who have experienced
self-harm.
“Self injury is just how someone is coping with depression, anxiety, or trauma, and I
teach them effective ways of coping with it. But really it’s the depression, anxiety,
and trauma that I’m treating,” she said.
Seliner said “self-hatred” is bound to be a factor when people hurt their own bodies.
Some patients who self-harm also display what Seliner calls “attempted
perfectionism”, saying they avoid drugs or alcohol, and use self-injury as a way to
calm themselves.

14. Joni Nowicki, an Admissions Coordinator at S.A.F.E, has also observed a tendency
toward perfectionism among some clients.
“[Self harm patients] don’t fit the stereotype. I would say it’s more the people who
are perfectionists..and models, doctors, social workers, nurses, those that are doing
well in sports,” Nowicki said.
Barry Walsh said another prominent reason for self-harm is what he termed the
emotion-regulation factor.
“It’s very clear what it’s about. It’s serves primarily as an emotion regulation
function for people. You can pretty much assume if you’re going to meet with
someone who self injures, that they have some issues with emotion dis-regulation,”
Walsh said.
Walsh and other experts interviewed agreed that self-injury does not discriminate:
usually there is no socio-economic or racial indicator.
Not a Girl Thing
As a seventh grader, my friends and I avidly watched the Canadian teen-drama,
Degrassi: The Next Generation.

15. In an episode entitled, “Whisper to A Scream,” viewers watch as Ellie, a central
character, grows increasingly overwhelmed after her father deploys and her
mother’s drinking increases.
Ellie walks down the halls of her high school dressed in black stockings, black boots,
and a black leather cut off jacket. After a scene of applying heavy black eye-makeup
and fiddling with scissors, Ellie returns home to find her mother drunk. The next
day, after oversleeping, she runs into her school’s bathroom and cuts herself for the
second time with her geometry compass.
As a polar opposite of sitcoms, this seems to be the other side of a media portrayal of
self-harm: a troubled or rebellious young woman who harms herself.
In Thirteen, Evan Rachel Wood plays Tracy Freeland. Throughout the film, a new
friend influences Freeland, which leads her to experiment with drugs and sex.
Freeland and her mother then constantly argue. In one scene, Freeland, dressed in
all black, locks herself in her bathroom, and cuts herself.
“Media or popular culture—can play into [stereotypes] for some ways for sure.
There are sort of stereotypes about the particular adolescent female girl in a black
hooded sweatshirt that’s listening to a particular kind of music and cutting herself,”
Catherine Glenn said.

16. Scott Brayden* is an assistant director of Student Activities at a school in
Philadelphia.
Brayden enjoys participating in Tough Mudder events, a 10-12 mile stretch of
obstacle courses that are both challenging and unique. To offer a snapshot, the first
course of the race is affectionately titled the “Artic Enema.”
He also enjoys other forms of extreme exercise, actively participating in the CrossFit
program.
“I love challenges. I love that little bit of struggle that those activities afford us. I like
the community that develops around that shared fight,” Brayden said.
Brayden also recently started playing the guitar and enjoys adventure novels.
“One of those [three] things makes me very attractive to women. Hint: It’s the
novels,” Brayden joked.
He recently attended the 2014 Ignatian Family Teach-In for justice, noting that he
felt “proud to be a part of it and [to] introduce some great students to the work of
that extended family.” With his Jesuit education, Brayden still feels connected to the
values of St. Ignatius Loyola. These values include “magis” which means seeking “the

17. more” in one’s daily life, being a man for and with others, finding God in all things,
and "cura personalis” which means “care for the whole person.”
Brayden says he almost has “half a memory” of the first time he encountered the
idea of self-injury.
“Just after primetime, the last show you’re allowed to watch before you go to bed on
the WB..I feel like that was the type of media and story that was introducing this to
me as a thing that existed in the world,” he said.
Brayden said the subject never really came up during his childhood.
“Definitely [at that time] nobody is having this conversation with me, as far as adults
saying, ‘don’t do this!,” that just wasn’t on my radar at all.”
At 17, Brayden hurt himself for the first time. He said his bouts of self-harm lasted
for about a year and a half.
Brayden’s mother had recently been diagnosed with cancer, and he had been
spending a lot of time alone.
“This was all kind of coming out of the fact that my mom had been diagnosed with
cancer…and there was almost this guilt that I wasn’t upset or hurting enough. I

18. didn’t feel like I was meeting those expectations of how bad I was supposed to feel,”
Brayden said.
Brayden explained that self-injury served as a means to get to what thought he
should have been feeling.
“So it was like something along the lines of a self-inflicted punishment, trying to get
myself to that level of hurting that I thought I should be if I wanted to be what I
thought I should be as a son whose mom has cancer,” he said.
Experts such as Catherine Glenn at Harvard have found that self-criticism can play a
role in propelling a young adult to self-harm.
“I thought ‘I’m not upset enough. I’m not angry enough all the time, so I need to do
something to get myself there.” Brayden said.
“There’s been a lot of research (by Joe Franklin, who is another post-doc in the lab,
and Jill Hooley who is another faculty member in this office) on self-criticism and
the role of self-criticism. It seems to be particularly predictive of why individuals
might choose something like self injury as opposed to other kinds of things we
might do to help regulate our emotions if we’re feeling intensely unpleasant,” Glenn
said.

19. Brayden says that he felt a great deal of “family shame,” and that he wasn’t “being a
good son.”
No one knew that Brayden had self-harmed.
Brayden said he experienced firsthand how different gender-based stigmas and
stereotypes can affect males and females.
“I saw cutting straight lines on your wrists as what the girl with the heavy mascara
and hello kitty backpack does on whatever show runs before Smallville. So when I
was making that choice, I was like ‘that can’t be me, my ‘ritual’ has to be something
different than that.”
Brayden only hurt himself when he was alone at his shore-house; his vacation home
was his designated self-harm location. Whenever Brayden self-harmed, he would
get a knife from his home’s kitchen, and use the house’s fireplace to heat the knife.
Then he would brand his left shoulder, re-breaking the same scar every time he self-
harmed.
Barry Walsh strongly refuted the notion that self-harm is a predominantly female
phenomenon.

20. “It’s a myth that it’s a female problem. In the samples, there’s no gender difference.
In clinical samples, there’s a lot more females than males but that doesn’t mean that
it’s female, it means that females are more likely to seek and receive treatment
because they’re more receptive to treatment,” Walsh said.
Brayden’s last bout with self-injury was almost 10 years ago. He said he avoids
falling into old habits through methods such as exercise as a way of channeling guilt
or stress.
“Now, I put these challenges in front of me, knowing I can overcome. I put some of
that pressure on myself and channel it in a much healthier and better way. There’s
still a little bit of that bargaining/negotiating mentality,” he said.
But he did add that self-harm is not something easily forgotten or neglected.
“I’m not sure you ever really shake it,” Brayden said.
Riding the Urge
Kate Bentley, a fourth-year doctoral student who works in Dr. David H. Barlow’s
Transdiagnostic Treatment Lab at Boston University, succinctly summed up the
range of treatment options for those who self-injure.

21. “There aren’t many good treatment options.”
Bentley said that people who self-injure are usually referred either to a yearlong
course known as Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) or must seek a
psychotherapist to address the mental and emotional issues involved.
While enrollment can be difficult, “DBT is the gold standard treatment for
borderline personality disorder and it’s typically very time intensive and lengthy”,
Bentley said. “ It does require much of a commitment.”
Moreover, she added, “There aren’t a whole lot of evidence-based, empirically-based
options for people who engage in self injury.
Bentley previously worked in the Depression Clinic and Research program at
Massachusetts General Hospital. In her current work, she is attempting to determine
the underlying mechanisms of self-harm. She says there are different kinds of
mechanisms, including automatic positive reinforcement (where someone
essentially feels positive or relieved after self injuring) or interpersonal
reinforcement (where someone aims to get attention from others through self-harm
habits).
Even attempts to treat-self injury are subject to media misrepresentation. In yet
another episode of Degrassi, Ellie is seen entering school on a Saturday for

22. detention. Before she enters the building, she anxiously pulls and slaps a rubber
band against her wrist.
When a classmate later asks Ellie about the rubber bands, she says it’s a “therapy
technique,” to stop her from “you know.”
In fact, several mental health specialists do not advise their clients who self-harm to
use rubber band techniques, arguing it encourages replacing one form of pain with
another.
“There are some specialists who are adamantly opposed to that, in their minds
replacing it with something more mild is continuing the narrative that you need
something..and you really don’t. I would argue that you don’t,” Janis Whitlock,
Director of the Cornell University Research Program on Self-Injury and Recovery,
said in an interview.
Whitlock said she personally urges against using methods like smacking rubber
bands against one’s skin and/or holding ice cubes.
Catherine Glenn described other, minor methods to abstain from self-harm.

23. “Individuals might choose to take a shower or spend time petting their cat or those
kind of distraction techniques to help sort of tolerate stress in the moment in order
to ride the wave or ride the urge,” she said.
Not Being That Depressed Person Anymore
Michelle Seliner nervously laughs as she recalls a professor from her undergrad
strongly advising her to never work with the self-injurious population.
“She said they will suck you dry, and there is really no effective treatment.
Somewhere in my head, that got tucked away. She was a great professor, but she
was just pretty negative about that diagnosis,” Seliner said.
Seliner strongly maintains that self-injury is used to mask some other problem.
Bree Demasco studies Film, Video, and Animation at Rhode Island School of Design.
She often bounces into her seasonal job at a yogurt shop in Cambridge toting small
brown bags with a Ziploc bag of kale, a Macintosh apple, and large, Bugs Bunny-
esque carrots.
She loves to dance and listen to the band Cake.

24. Until age 15, Demasco never understood how anyone could hurt his or her own
body.
“[I saw] other people doing it and at first I was just outraged and thought, ‘Why
would someone would want to cause themselves physical harm?” she said.
After a host of athletic injuries, Demasco grew frustrated and started to cut her hips
and upper thighs. She explained that since no one seemed to gauge or understand
the magnitude of the pain she felt due to these athletic injuries, she wanted to do
something else to get people to notice.
“I think a lot of it was just probably some sort of attention-seeking device. People
would think I was lying and faking..so I think this was kind of a way for me to both
feel pain in a different area, feel a different kind of pain, ..this pain was better,
probably just a mechanism [to convey] ‘don’t ignore me, I actually have a problem,”
Demasco said.
Her self-harm rituals lasted about four years, and she stopped after officials at her
boarding school noticed her injured arms and began performing weekly body
checks and threatened to kick her out if she continued.
“I thought f--- it, it’s not worth it. So I tried to fill the void with exercise and that
worked,” Demasco said.

25. Now, in her young adult life, Demasco thinks about the long-term effects whenever
she encounters the urge to harm herself.
“I guess I just think about not wanting attention in that way anymore, or not
wanting to be this depressed person, not wanting to have anything on my body or
could be seen as someone who is sad,” Demasco said.
Demasco also admitted that she largely refrains from cutting herself as a result of
considering how others may react at her scars.
“So I can’t cut myself purely for purposes of caring about what other people think,
and that kind of sucks. I personally don’t have a problem with scars, I think scars are
really beautiful, but you just kind of have to think about the rest of the world and
how they’re going to perceive you—like trying to walk into a job interview and they
see cuts on my arm—that’s really bad,” Demasco explained.
Mainstream Media
Joni Nowicki noted that the most famous person associated with self-harm is
probably Princess Diana. Nowicki said that SAFE shows a video about Princess
Diana entitled “Can You See My Pain?” at their trainings.

26. In an interview with BBC in 1995, Princess Diana said that she had self-injured her
arms and legs. She then described her experience with self-harm in depth.
“You have so much pain inside yourself, that you try and hurt yourself on the
outside because you want help, but it's the wrong help you're asking for. People see
it as crying wolf or attention-seeking..But I was actually crying out because I wanted
to get better in order to go forward and continue my duty and my role as wife,
mother, Princess of Wales. So yes, I did inflict upon myself. I didn't like myself, I was
ashamed because I couldn't cope with the pressures,” Princess Diana said in the
interview.
Demi Lovato, award-winning singer and actress, has also publicly explained her
experience with self-harm both in an interview with Robin Roberts and in her book,
Staying Strong: 365 Days a Year.
In an interview, the organization To Write Love on Her Arms also discussed their
movie scheduled to be released in 2015.
“The movie, “To Write Love On Her Arms,” centers the struggles of a young woman
named Renee Yohe with depression, addiction, and self injury. The movie sheds light
on contrasting realities of pain and peace, addiction and sobriety, regret and
freedom. The title, "To Write Love On Her Arms" also represented the goal of

27. believing that a better life was possible,” TWLOHA, who chose to be quoted as a
collective organization, said.
The To Write Love on Her Arms Organization describes itself as “bridge for people
who are struggling with depression, anxiety, self-injury, and suicide.”
Representatives visit schools, hold events, and implement campaigns. Jamie
Tworkowski founded the non-profit organization in Florida in 2006 after he learned
that a close friend been experiencing severe depression and self-harming herself.
“We want to remind you that you are living a story,” TWLOHA said in email
correspondence when explaining their organization.
Fears vs. Dreams is a recent campaign of the organization. At events, people will
answer, “What is your biggest fear? What is your greatest dream?” These events are
designed to offer hope to those who have self-harmed, as well as those who have
not.
A Problem That Confounds Treatment
In an interview, I asked Janis Whitlock the likelihood of relapse for those who self-
harm, after a prolonged period of refraining.

28. “We don’t look specifically at relapse. It’s really common for people to go for longish
periods of times between episodes. It can really be deceiving—it can feel like it’s
over, and then it starts again,” Whitlock said.
She added that it’s common for the adolescent and the overall self-harm population
to self-harm for between two and five years, and “then just stop.”
“A lot of people just tend to grow out of it over time,” Whitlock said.
Whitlock said as those who self-harm age, it becomes easier for them to refrain from
these habits, and deem their time self-harming as a passing point in their lives.
Asked how people are able to stop or continue living without self-harming, Whitlock
suggested therapy.
“It’s helpful to have someone to work with you on the deeper issues related to
emotion or thought. Because there are specific patterns that go along with self-
injury. Therapy is always something I would suggest and encourage,” Whitlock said.
Whitlock also made the important point that just because someone self-injures, does
not mean they necessarily have any intention of committing suicide.

29. “We know non-suicidal self-injury, by definition, is injuring without the intention of
suicide. Basically, if someone is in your office and they are actively injuring that day,
the chances they are suicidal that day are very low because they are actually coping
[through self-injury],” she said.
Stigmatization and misunderstanding about self-harm persist, as is evident in the
DSM’s lack of any specific listing, and the media’s constant use of self-injury as a
laugh-line.
There is no single profile of someone who self-injures, and the range of research,
therapy, and opinion also is broad.
Many people who self-harm, or who have self-harmed, concede that the behavior
can be seen as an attention-grabbing device. However, these same people also have
a message: There is more to a person than his or her self-harm habits.
Lyla Meritt will finish out the remainder of her senior year, she will probably be
found laughing or discussing how she wants to “drop out of school to join the
circus.”
Meritt is multi-faceted, and she is not a victim.

30. “I am not a victim of self-harm. I am a hero. I saved my own life surrounded by those
who love me,” she said.
*Names have been changed