School children and self-harm: Staff perspectives and concerns (original) (raw)
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Staff knowledge and attitudes towards deliberate self-harm in adolescents
Journal of adolescence, 2003
This study investigates knowledge, attitudes and training needs concerning deliberate self-harm (DSH) in adolescents, amongst a variety of professionals involved in the assessment and management of adolescence who self-harm. A questionnaire survey was completed by 126 health professionals working with adolescents who harm themselves. The main outcome measures were a knowledge measure and three attitude measures (generated using factor analysis). The mean percentage of correctly answered knowledge questions, across all professional groups, was 60%. With regard to knowledge, over three-quarters of participants were unaware that homosexual young men and those who had been sexually abused are at greater risk of DSH, whilst one third of staff were unaware that adolescents who self-harm are at increased risk of suicide. Staff who felt more effective felt less negative towards this group of patients (B=-0.21, p=0.03). Forty-two per cent of the participants wanted further training in DSH am...
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2019
Self-harm rates are increasing globally and demand for supporting, treating and managing young people who engage in self-harm often falls to schools. Yet the approach taken by schools varies. This study aimed to explore the experience of school staff managing self-harm, and to obtain their views on the use of guidelines in their work. Twenty-six pastoral care staff from New Zealand were interviewed. Interviews were analyzed and coded using thematic analysis. Three themes emerged: The burden of the role; discrepancies in expectations, training, and experience; and the need for guidelines to support their work. This research, therefore, demonstrated a need for guidelines to support school staff to provide support around decision making and response to self-harm in the school environment.
Background: Self-harm behaviors consist of parasuicidal behaviors, which represent “a deliberate destruction of body tissue, with or without suicidal intent”. A theoretical model is the Experiential Avoidance Model. The most frequent risk factors are school distress, poor social integration, poor social and family support, drugs use, sexual abuse, altered sense of life and death, bad relationship with the body and unsolved body mentalization process. Objectives: The objective of the present study was to perform an analysis of risk factors for self-harm behaviors, to help plan preventive actions. Patients and Methods: One questionnaire with specific scales was employed for students, whereas three semi-structured interviews were employed for teachers, all on distress perception and self-harm in school. Results: Data analysis confirms an association between cutting and alcohol use, sexual harassments, school dropout, threatening people, incommunicability with family members and negative relationship with the body and suicide attempts, with a clear tendency for males. In the interviews, teachers highlight self-injury as a dysfunctional relationship with the body and observe several risk markers of psychological distress. Conclusions: The results confirm the available literature data, while noting that self-harming is a preponderantly male behavior. The results also signal the need to create opportunities to instruct teachers to combat the resistances and stereotypes of psychological distress.
Narratives of self-harm at school: Identifying trajectories of intervention in educational contexts
Europe’s Journal of Psychology, 2020
Recent studies have shown that self-harming behaviour is increasingly widespread among adolescents, in particular at school. However, educational institutions perceive themselves unable to cope with the phenomenon, searching for protocols and guidelines to improve its management. Considering schools as useful contexts for intercepting the young malaise, this study aims at exploring the main meanings of self-harming behaviours made within the educational cultural contexts starting from the student’s narrations, in order to understand the possible trajectories of practice. In two high schools we have collected 96 narratives of self-harm written by adolescents (mean age 14; 74% females), who have been engaged in non-suicidal self-injury once in their life. The analysis of the narratives, produced with the help of a software for the automatic qualitative analysis of texts, has allowed to identify four prevalent themes organized into three sense vectors. The findings highlighted signific...