title: Beyond medicalization: Self-injuring acts revisited.
abstract: For too long, medical/psychiatric and psychological studies, with focus on emotional sensitivity, personality traits, and correlation with psychopathology, have dominated research on self-injuring acts. The phenomenon thus has been defined as a predominantly medical issue. However, a large body of community prevalence studies show self-injuring acts to be a common phenomenon in society, and most of those who self-injure are unknown in psychiatric or other clinical settings. This article describes and analyzes the medicalization of self-injuring acts and argues a need to move research on self-injuring acts out of the medical paradigm. There is a need to explicitly explore the impact of social, cultural, structural, and gendered factors surrounding and influencing self-injuring acts. A non-medical approach, beyond the limits of the medical perspective, would feed research forward and create a more nuanced view on this widespread social phenomenon.
authors.affiliation: Umeå University, Sweden inger.ekman@umu.se.
authors.forename: Inger
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Ekman
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D062528:Medicalization; D016728:Self-Injurious Behavior / Q000517:prevention & control* / Q000523:psychology*; D013406:Suicide, Attempted; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: demedicalization; gender; medicalization; research context; self-injuring acts