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Self-Injurers as Loners: The Social Organization of Solitary Deviance

2005; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 26; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/016396290931696

1521-0456

Patricia A. Adler, Peter Adler,

Gun Ownership and Violence Research

ABSTRACT In this paper we examine the social organization of people who deliberately destroy or damage their own body tissue without suicidal intent. Best and Luckenbill (Citation1982) have proposed two typologies of deviance performed by solitary actors: loners, who lack the regular association with fellow deviants and have no membership in a deviant subculture, and individual deviants, who are the actors and objects of their behaviors, yet socialize with others like them. Based on a convenience sample of 40 in-depth interviews with people who self-cut, burn, brand, scratch, bite, and bone-break, we describe and analyze the way their behaviors correspond to and differ from other forms of individual and loner deviance. Notes 1While people may do a variety of almost unimaginable things to themselves, such as self-amputating, drilling holes into their skulls, intentionally making themselves ill (Munchausen Syndrome), and decorating their bodies in extremely radical ways, these behaviors fall outside of the behaviors clinically associated with the specific syndrome known best at the turn of the twenty-first century as self-injury. We therefore restrict our focus to these practices not arbitrarily, but because they have been traditionally associated together in the medical literature and because they are performed by a constant group of people. In other words, people who intentionally make themselves ill or who cut off their limbs are not the same people who cut or burn themselves, and people who get tattooed or scarified come from a dramatically different etiology than people who self-injure, despite the fact that members of both groups may carve words or designs into themselves. These are different phenomena practiced by different people. 2Suyemoto and Macdonald (1995) also noted that most self-injurers desisted after adolescence. 3We were not permitted to interview participants under the age of 18 without parental consent, which blocked many current self-injurers from the study, as most ceased the behavior by the age of 18, and few under that age revealed their behavior to their parents. In addition, we were blocked from interviewing current students, who were the most frequent volunteers for our sample, and by making people wait a semester to be interviewed, we lost participants who transferred, moved away, or lost their nerve to participate in the research. 4Estimations of participants' cessation come from their own self-reports and may therefore not be completely accurate. 5They thus had many demographic similarities to the population of individuals with eating disorders. 6Some of the self-injurers we interviewed were neither loners nor individual deviants. Out of the 39 people we spoke with, three were clearly not loners because even though they performed the acts on themselves, they cut, branded, burned, or even electro-shocked themselves socially, in the company of one or more friends. Several more knew and spoke with others who self-injured, although their associations with them were deliberately limited. One of our participants was not an individual deviant, because he required the participation of others to perform the act (he and his friends held hands and electro-shocked themselves in a chain off of a generator or an electrical socket). These outliers are not the main focus of this paper, and they are probably rare, so for the main we will not include them in our descriptions and analyses. 7Some popular treatments that came to public attention leading up to or around this time included films such as "Girl Interrupted," "Nightmare on Elm Street III," and "Secretary," television shows with episodes on cutting such as "ER," documentary treatments on The Learning Channel, popular songs such as "Hurt" by Nine Inch Nails, "Crawling" by Linkin Park, "Back to the Coast" by Nikki Sudden, "Last Resort" by Papa Roach, and personal revelations from Richey Edwards, the guitarist and songwriter for Manic Street Preachers. See also Egan (Citation1997). 8Some of these included people such as Johnny Depp, Drew Barrymore, Angelina Jolie, Christina Ricci, Fiona Apple, Richey Edwards, Courtney Love, Marilyn Manson, Shirley Manson, Elizabeth Wurtzel, and Princess Diana. 9Hodgson (Citation2004) also talked about people who learned about self-injury from others as a route into the behavior. 10People weaned themselves from self-injury in much the same ways Granfield and Cloud (Citation1999) discussed drug addicts overcoming addiction without treatment. 11One social self-injurer was drawn in by a member of the other gender into a series of coupled sessions, where they cut and licked each others' blood. This was defined as very erotic. 12Rosenthal et al. (1972) found, in contrast, that over half of the 18 participants they studied made their cuts on Friday or Saturday nights, with another peak occurring on Wednesday afternoon. 13Favazza (1996) also noted that some self-injurers do not feel the pain from their body mutilation. 14Out of curiosity he used the knife later to try to cut himself. He wanted to experience the benefits of the self-injury firsthand. Yet, lacking the angst that brought most self-injurers to their behavior, all he got were some scars and a lot of pain. He offers an interesting example of a "failed cutter." 15This sentiment clearly became more widespread, as self-injury diffused through the culture and websites devoted to it sprang up in the early 2000s. In a future work (Adler and Adler, in preparation), we discuss the proliferation of website chatting about self-injury, and the types of interactions and support people offer each other via these anonymous and distant, yet frequent, regular, and often intimate internet relationships and communities. 16Solomon and Farrand (1996) also reported a case where a young woman chose self-injury as an alternative to suicide, considering the former preferable. 17In this, self-injurers resemble the shifts and oscillations of deviants trying unsuccessfully to quit the deviant world but being drawn back in, only to foray out and relapse once again (see Adler and Adler 1983). 18In describing the self-injury of the cutters she studied, Hodgson (2004) also noted that they used non-normative means to appear normal.