Making Sense of Self-Harm provides a much needed alternative examination of a potent and increasingly prevalent pattern of distress and estrangement that has come to haunt contemporary society. By exploring nonsuicidal self-injury through the lens of cultural sociology and the insights of thinkers like Michel Foucault, Norbert Elias and Susan Bordo, the book describes it more as a kind of idiomatic practice in need of understanding than as a medical illness in need of biological explanation. Grounding analysis in compelling interviews with people who self-harm and in multiple cultural representations of the practice from books and magazines to music and movies, Steggals uncovers the history of self-harm, maps its hidden meanings and traces its peculiar resonance with the symbolic life of late-modern society, eventually coming to make sense of a phenomenon that so many find profoundly disturbed and disturbing. Peter Steggals is Visiting Researcher in Medical Sociology at Newcastle University, UK. He has previously worked with self-harming prisoners as part of a Forensic Psychology unit in Her Majesty's Prison Service. |