 In this series, I answer your questions about self-harm. I'll be adding to this series over time, so if you have a question, please leave it in a comment below or email it to me at pookie at inourhands.com. I really think it's important that we talk more about self-harm and everywhere I go, people have tons and tons of questions for me. So get asking and I'll get answering and I'd really love your input on these questions too, so do comment, please. Living with harmony over on Twitter asks of self-harm, where and how did it begin and is there a way to help others not to start? So two big questions there. One is around self-harm and is this a new phenomenon? This is something that I get asked quite a bit, like is this a new invention? We're seeing really high prevalence now, where's it come from? And it's really important to understand that self-harm isn't a new phenomenon. However, the high prevalence that we're seeing is a relatively new thing. That's partly about the fact that we've broken down a lot of the stigma surrounding self-harm. People can talk about it now, they can ask for advice and support on it. And so there's less hidden self-harm. It's much more a thing that you can own up to and ask for support about. So it's less hidden, but also we think the prevalence is genuinely higher. And I think there's all sorts of different reasons there, very complicated to go into. But I think one of the reasons is just simply people know about it now. So when I was a kid and I was self-harming, I just literally thought I was the only person in the world who'd ever done this. And it seemed a very strange thing to do. Nowadays, a kid would know of self-harm. It's in the media all the time. They would know people who'd done it. They'd know celebrities who'd done it. And it's quite a normalized thing. And if you were a young person facing difficulties, then different ways of coping with this, self-harm might be one that comes to mind. It might be something that you know, work for other people. So you might kind of give it a go. It's just part of the currency of teenage life. So more likely to do it now than before. But it has been going on historically a really, really long time. Like you can look back hundreds of years and particularly around religion, there is lots of evidence of self-harm around kind of self-flagellation and that kind of thing. The history is long. However, in terms of how we support and how we help young people not to start and all that kind of thing, this is quite a young science. So self-harm's been around for a really long time, but we haven't actually kind of stopped and listened and tried to understand it for all that long. So it's a really young science. But there's great work being done in this area. So in particular, I would shout out to my colleagues at the University of Nottingham, so the team that Ellen Townsend leads the self-harm research centre there is very good. But again, a really good example of the fact that we're learning all the time. So when I wrote my book on self-harm, so can I tell you about self-harm? I always send my books out to peer review by colleagues. And in this book, in the original version of the manuscript, I recommended putting elastic bands and snapping them on your wrist, which is a really recognised alternative to self-harm. And when I sent this script out for peer review, then Ellen made me aware of emerging research they have that suggest that this may be more harmful than helpful. And so we had to then think, okay, you need to really revise what we're recommending. So we're having to learn all the time. Now, the other part of Meta's question was, how can we prevent someone from starting self-harming? Now, what I'd say here is it's really important that we've got open lines of communication. So young people feel able to approach someone and talk about their issues and don't feel like they've got to manage it all themselves. Self-harm often happens when we don't have good lines of communication or we feel unable to open up and ask for support. So we end up trying to deal with this problem ourselves and self-harm is a way of managing how we're feeling. The other thing that we can do is to help young people to have good emotional literacy, to understand the wide range of different thoughts and feelings that they might experience in their day-to-day life and to be able to name those and to learn how to manage those different feelings. So if you think things like art and music and sport and writing, all sorts of different ways of getting out how we're feeling and really enabling ourselves to sort of understand that. We can also think about teaching young people a range of healthy coping strategies. So self-harm is essentially an unhealthy coping mechanism. It's a way of managing difficult thoughts, feelings and experiences. And if we teach young people, all young people, healthy ways of coping with difficult thoughts, feelings and experiences, then hopefully they turn to those methods rather than turning to something like self-harm. Now we should teach them as wide a range of different ways of coping as possible because we're all different and different things work for different people. Things like mindfulness, things like engaging in sporting activity, learning things like breathing techniques, the use of things like yoga. We might also think about how we get out big feelings if we're over one with anger. So even simple things, jumping up and down, running on the sport, shouting in my head or shouting out loud. There's so many different ones. I could do like a whole video on different coping strategies. But the thing here is actually about enabling young people to be exposed to a really wide range of them in the hope that then if they get to a point where they're overwhelmed by difficult thoughts and feelings and experiences, that they're able to think about the different strategies they might use to manage with this moment because they will have practiced it at a time of calm. So we can do a lot in terms of prevention by just educating the kids that we work with about different strategies for managing at difficult times. We've got to learn how to do it at times of calm and then in times of crisis, we have this toolbox of different strategies that we might engage with. Yeah, I hope that helps.