Self-injury awareness can be raised in many ways, and sometimes fiction and art can be a powerful tool. The Self Injury Through Time theater project was launched in February 2024 in Bristol. It is the result of the collaboration between UK-based organization Self Injury Support, Dr. Alanna Skuse and Acta Bristol, a charity dedicated to making theater more accessible. Over the course of six months, volunteers with lived experience will research, write, and perform a play about the history of self-injury. Unfortunately, the project is still running low on participants, so feel free to join if you live in or near Bristol! If you do not live in the area, you can still contribute as the group is also looking for written submissions.

Dr. Skuse is an author, researcher and historian. She is an associate professor at the University of Reading in the department of English Literature. Her research revolves around medicine in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth century. She has written extensively about surgery and cancer in history, with a special focus on their prevalence in literature. She gave us an interview to discuss the project.

The project

Everyone with lived experience is welcomed to join the group. “We have participants from their twenties to their seventies, who have experienced self-harm in different ways, some very recently, others many years ago”, explains Dr. Skuse, who despite this great diversity of participants regrets that more people don’t join the group. “So far we have received a lot of interest both from the general public and the media, but we are still low on participants, so do spread the word!”. It’s still too early to tell how participant’s understanding of self-injury has changed, but the project has already sparked off some interesting reactions. “Certainly they have been surprised to learn how old this phenomenon is and how openly it was talked about in the past”. 

Collaborative work is an enriching way to combine the academic theory and knowledge, the field work of charities, and the experience of people who suffer from self-injury. “This is a great collaboration because we all bring our own areas of expertise: mine in history and research, Self Injury Support and acta in facilitating and safeguarding, and the participants bring not only their experiences of self-injury but also their life experiences and skills. I hope the end project will be something greater than the sum of all our parts!”

Dr. Skuse believes the fictional nature of the play can help people open up. “In a previous project involving visual arts, participants said that the historical lens helped them talk about self-injury more comfortably, because it provided a way into the subject that was less personal. In these workshops we are not asking people to necessarily share their experiences but to reflect on how society views self-injury”.

Self-injury through time

Interestingly, society hasn’t always seen self-injury as a pathology, but rather sometimes as an extreme reaction to understandable circumstances. The perception of self-castration in early modern England, for instance, illustrates this point. Dr. Skuse argues it was a means to prevent sexual urges or to make sure their children were their own. It testifies to fears and social norms of the time in regard to religion, the place of men in society, and filiation. While it was considered an extreme means at the time, it was not seen as the result of mental illness as the reasons for such an act were understood. Alanna Skuse also wrote about the literary trope of self-amputation of the tongue. It was interpreted as a means of protest and asserting one’s right over their own body. At the time, the regime was becoming more and more authoritarian, and so they could resort to torture to extract information, and criminalized suicide.

Nowadays, our interpretation of self-injury is mainly pathological but some movements still insist on demedicalizing the behavior. Alanna Skuse believes both perceptions have a role to play. “It is important not to underestimate the positive impact that medical interventions such as antidepressants can have on the lives of people who self-injure in connection with depression or other mental health problems”, she explains. “We are not aiming to completely divorce self-injury from this context. However, understanding the social factors at work is important because it helps us identify the risk factors which lead to self-injury, and to break the cycle of blame and shame which is often attached to it.”

While self-injury is not a universal practice, studying it through history can teach us about self-injury today, which is the aim of the Self Injury through Time project. “In the period of history I study, self-injury is not viewed as a pattern of behaviour – it is nearly always a one-off response to a particular situation. One thing that shows up clearly is the complex relationship between body and ‘self’. Self-injury involves both seeing the body as a part of the ‘self’ and seeing it as an instrument or vessel in which the self ‘lives’. Trying to negotiate this relationship with one’s own body seems important to our understanding of self-injury and mental health more generally. Renaissance people also emphasised the importance of looking after both body and soul in staying mentally healthy – many of the cures they recommended were ones we’d recognise, such as diet, exercise, and the company of friends.”

Read more about the project on Self Injury Support’s page.

Dr. Alanna Skuse’s website: https://www.dralannaskuse.co.uk/

Self Injury Support’s website: https://www.selfinjurysupport.org.uk/

acta’s website: https://acta-bristol.com/

The two papers written by Dr. Skuse that we discussed in this article are open-access, you will find the links in the reference below.

References

Skuse, A. (2020). ‘One Stroak of His Razour’: Tales of Self-Gelding in Early Modern England. Social History of Medicine, 33(2), 377-393. https://dx.doi.org/10.1093/shm/hky100

Skuse, A. (2022). Biting one’s tongue: autoglossotomy and agency in The Spanish Tragedy. Renaissance Studies, 36(2), 278-294. https://doi.org/10.1111/rest.12747