By Gudrun Schultz
BOURNEMOUTH, Great Britain, April 25, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Nurses are pushing for a policy change that would allow patients who cut and burn themselves to keep their blades and other implements with them in hospital settings.
The BBC reported today on the request made by nurses in the Royal College of Nursing. Pointing to a pilot project undertaken by St. George’s mental health hospital in Staffordshire, the nurses say allowing self-harming such as cutting or burning to continue helps patients to deal with past mental trauma and reduces thoughts of suicide.
St. George’s Hospital provides patients with cleaning equipment for blades and other “tools” of self-harm. The project suggests that self-harm as part of a care plan can eventually reduce a patients’ need to injure them self as a way of coping.
They argued that drug addicts are given clean needles and syringes, and said preventing patients from self-harming made the problem worse.
Jenifer Clarke-Moore, from the Royal Collage of Nurses’ mental health practice forum, does not agree.
“My concern is that this is leading us up the garden path,” she said, saying self-harm would be a “cheap-fix solution” to the problem. She said “evidence-based interventions which promote health” would be more effective.
Self-harming can be a symptom of several serious mental health disorders, such as personality, bipolar, and obsessive-compulsive disorders. It begins most commonly in adolescence, often used as a coping mechanism for girls and young women dealing with trauma. The U.S. National Mental Health Agency reports that almost 50% of people who repeatedly injure themselves say they were physically or sexually abused as children.