title: The healing journey: help seeking for self-injury among a community population.
abstract: Help seeking is known to be a complex and difficult journey for people who self-injure. In this article, we explore the process of help seeking from the perspective of a group of people living in Northern Ireland with a history of self-injury. We conducted 10 semistructured interviews and employed a grounded theory approach to data analysis. We created two major categories from the interview transcript data: (a) "involution of feeling," which depicts participants' perspectives on barriers to help seeking; and (b) "to be treated like a person," in which participants communicate their experiences of help seeking. The findings pose important implications for policy, practice, theory, and future research, including the need to increase the uptake of follow-up care among people who arrive at hospitals as a result of self-injury, self-harm, or suicidal behaviors.
authors.affiliation: University of Ulster, Jordanstown Campus, Newtownabbey, United Kingdom m.long@ulster.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Maggie
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Long
authors.affiliation: University of Ulster, Magee Campus, Derry, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Roger
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Manktelow
authors.affiliation: University of Ulster, Magee Campus, Derry, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Anne
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Tracey
mesh_terms: D000223:Adaptation, Psychological; D005239:Fear; D005260:Female; D066296:Grounded Theory; D006801:Humans; D007407:Interviews as Topic; D008297:Male; D009660:Northern Ireland; D010342:Patient Acceptance of Health Care / Q000523:psychology*; D016728:Self-Injurious Behavior / Q000523:psychology*; D012931:Social Environment; D057545:Social Stigma; D059020:Suicidal Ideation
keywords: grounded theory; health care, access to; health seeking; mental health and illness; qualitative analysis; self-injury; stigma