AMJ Deliberate Self Harm/Self Injury

As with all AMJ courses the idea here is to take a potentially complex topic and make it both understandable and engaging for a wide range of people.

Deliberate self-harm can be confusing and bewildering for both staff and service-users. Ideas about ‘manipulation’ or a ‘cry for help’ do little or nothing to help prevent future self-harm. This course explores some alternative notions and examines ways that support workers can make a difference in a genuinely difficult situation.

There is a great deal that support staff in can do to assist people who harm themselves. The trick is to be able to see past the behaviour and to understand the person who cuts themselves, takes overdoses or otherwise injures themselves.

In the past this sort of behaviour has been written off as attention-seeking or an attempt to manipulate workers and yet most self-harm happens in secret and never comes to the attention of the staff.

Something else is going on and the tired old notion that it is merely ‘behavioural’ is both meaningless and irrelevant in a modern context of deliberate self-harm.

Delivery:	In house
Category:	Nursing & Care