Which is great! I mean, it’s just fantastic to think so many people will be wearing our wristbands through March – it makes us proud of our members and supporters, and really helps our organisation’s finances.

As you know, we’re a voluntary org and we’re unfunded. Everything we do, we do out of consideration for you, our visitors, not because it’s our job to, or because we get paid to. FirstSigns is run by people with personal experience of self-injury for people affected by self-injury.

So as an unfunded organisation, designing and selling wristbands really helps us to pay for our website costs and our printing costs – everything that makes us exist if you see what I mean.

So we’d like to invite you to buy an orange wristband from us in November to help us now.

There’s so much to do now. February and SIAD are just around the corner – we look forward to the increased interest in SI and in our services from people and from the media, but we need to prepare now, to make sure we’re still running smoothly when SIAD comes around.

We’re asking for your help now – we know lots of people will help us in February, but we’re asking for your help now.

Please buy a wristband in November and help us survive and thrive in time for SIAD.

You’ll be welcome to buy our new keyrings in February ;)

We are busy planning for Self Injury Awareness Day on 1^st March 2010, and we have loads of great ideas that will help make SIAD 2010 our best ever.

One of these is to produce a FirstSigns calendar, and we thought it would be great if some our members could get involved and help us with the pictures. So, we’d like to invite you to submit pictures of your artwork or photographs for possible inclusion in the calendar, our books and on our website.

Don’t worry if you’re not artistic; we’re not looking for perfection here. All we ask is that your pictures are positive and / or inspiring; after all, they’ll be viewed for a whole month in people’s homes and offices!

If you’re not into art or drawing, then maybe you’d like to take a photograph of something that makes you smile or that inspires you. It could be a tree, a favourite view, or even a pet! If you’re over 18 you are welcome to include yourself in the picture if you wish, but we are unable to publish pictures involving other people.

Please email you pictures or images to Jules@FirstSigns.org.uk and include the name you would like your picture published under (either your first name or a nickname) and one short sentence describing what the picture is.

Please ensure you send us the largest image your camera is able to take, as the ‘image quality’ needs to be high. This means the file you attach to your email will be quite large, so don’t be surprised if it takes a couple of minutes to send.

We’ve got some great pics already submitted to our Confessions / Expressions wall, and you’re welcome to upload your artwork there still – right now we’re asking for your artwork and photographs to be emailed in.

Many thanks and we look forward to hearing from you.

Wedge and Jules

• Link

This is sensationalism. The newspapers are whipping up a storm. We have advised the NHS for many many years that when supporting a person in long-term care that it’s impossible to deny that person the right to hurt themselves. Yes, the right.

It’s counterproductive. If you take their control mechanism away, they just rebel and find other ways to hurt themselves in desperation. By recognising that self-harm a coping mechanism, health care professionals can then provide new ways of coping, and empower a person to make new choices.

FirstSigns supports the idea of respecting people’s choices, even if that choice is not ideal in the opinion of the doctor. FirstSigns supports the idea of providing privacy, and clean tools and materials for self-care after self-injurious behaviour. FirstSigns believes health care professionals should be protected from the distress caused by a person’s self-harm.

(Wedge]

Research research research – we need research – hard facts and data to interpret, to inform and change our behaviour. As a society, our Government, or employers, our health-care workers, need evidence to base their actions on. It makes perfect sense of course – we can’t take action based on whims – we need to know what we’re doing and why. We need to know what has the biggest impact for the buck, so we can spend money wisely and reap the best rewards. But whose statistics do we trust?

Those skin-care adverts on the tele say that 73% of women tested agreed the cream made them appear youthful. Then you read the small print and you find that they tested 35 women. What’s 73% of 35? Hmm, so basically *some* women liked this product after we gave it to them for free for a month, and some others didn’t. It’s hardly relevant to the whole country is it, when they only ask a handful of selected people.

At FirstSigns, we never claim to know how many people in the UK or in the world self-injure or self-harm. We’re asked for the stat a lot – as if knowing whether it’s 100,000 or 150,000 people will help us reach those people.

At FirstSigns, we look for better ways to support our members and help the many thousands of people who visit our websites. So yes, we sometimes ask research questions, and yes, we get statistics from these. We learn a little more about self-injury, and a little more about our members, but we don’t go around claiming that answers from 1000 people represent the country.

We know that there are no statistics that will help an individual in distress.

This isn’t a numbers game; we’re in this because we know, from the inside, how lonely and despair-filled self-injury can be.

So, is the UK happy or sad? With all the research going on all the time (and yes, 3^rd year University Pyschology Students often want to study depression and self-injury) do we know if the UK is getting happier or sadder?

Well, the Guardian commissioned Echo Research to look into boys’ lifestyles and found that:

• 95% believe their career prospects are good;
• 94% are happy in their home and family lives;
• 93% are happy in their social lives;
• 91% are happy in their school and work lives.

Based on 1000 boys.

That sounds pretty happy to me; sounds like parents and teachers just need to worry about less tha 9% of boys then – that’s just three lads per classroom.

The NSPCC might disagree.

The Telegraph reports that the NSPCC finds that 33% of 11-16 year olds are ‘upset, depressed, angry or stressed’.

Well, if the boys are happy, does that mean that the girls are depressed? I don’t think so. I think we’re looking at research bias. I think the Guardian with Echo Research have ‘found’ one thing in one area of society and the NSPCC have found something else in another area.

The NSPCC found that 49% of girls were emotionally distressed ‘most of the time’. Everyone deserves the space to experience sadness, stress and even anger at times (we are emotional creatures after all) but ‘most of the time’ (if true) is worrying.

I’m not going to remind you that ‘more girls turn to self-harm than boys’ because we don’t think it’s true; see our male pages here and our factsheet for men. Stats tell us that more girls hurt themselves than boys, but of course those statistics are created when a girl tells someone they have hurt themselves. What if boys just don’t tell, and just don’t get counted? Anyway, I digress.

The NSPCC found that 20% of children (1,200 children) said it was easier to talk about their true feelings online. At FirstSigns, we’ve always understood this. Self-injury is the ‘hidden affliction’; self-harm is the ’silent hurt’. We don’t talk. We don’t tell. But we can find space online to open up, to look at ourselves and even inspire others to reduce their self-harm. That’s what our Message Board is about, and we’ve had a fabulously supportive and active community for many years now.

{Wedge}

Or maybe you aren’t ready to talk yet, but need to get your feelings out somehow. One way of achieving both these things is by writing a letter to the person you want to tell. You never have to send the letter, it’s for your eyes only, but it will provide a route for your emotions and help to clear things up in your head for if you decide to have ‘the’ conversation for real.

Why?

Before you start writing, have a think about why you want to ‘come out’ to that person. Everyone is individual and experiencing a unique combination of circumstances, but here are some examples:

• You are tired of suffering in silence and need the support of your loved one;
• You have a holiday coming up and know that your scars may become visible;
• You feel ready to become intimate with your partner but realise he / she will see your scars;
• You need help and can’t deal with things on your own any more. Maybe you want some support or someone to go with you to see your GP;
• Someone else has found out about your self-injury and you are worried your loved one will be told. You would rather it came from you;
• You want to confide in your best friend and let him / her know what’s really going on in your head and how you are dealing with it;
• You want the person to understand how they affect you, and how they’re involved in the way you feel.

Once you start to write, just let yourself go and be honest about how you feel. Remember, this is a dummy letter and nobody need ever read it. You are doing this for your benefit only, and you need to be truthful to yourself. Try not to talk too much about the self-injury itself, but instead focus on the causes and emotional distress behind it. Take the time to think about how you really feel, try to dig a little deeper.

What?

Some things you might want to include in your letter are:

• Real-world reasons why you resort to self-injury (i.e. too much school work, financial problems);
• Emotional reasons why you resort to self-injury (i.e. depression, family arguments, anxiety, identity confusion);
• How long you have been self-injuring and whether it is getting better or worse in your opinion. Think about why you started to self-injure in the first place and whether you now self-injure for different reasons or whether you can now cope better before resorting to self-injury;
• Things that trigger you, including anything involving the person you are telling (such as arguments, invalidation of your feelings, too much criticism etc.);
• What you would like the other person to do to help (i.e. going with you to see you GP, giving you more space and time to yourself, creating a calmer environment for you to live in or providing an ear for you talk to when you feel the urge to self-injure);
• Any support you feel you need but aren’t getting. Do you need your loved one to be more aware of your emotional state or to spend more time with you for example;
• Efforts you are making to move away from self-injury; or
• Reasons why you don’t yet feel ready to move away from self-injury.

Bare in mind that although it’s easy to blame others for our emotional states, we are ultimately in control of our own actions and we make our own decisions. It’s not a good idea to blame others directly for our self-injury, no matter what they may have done. By claiming responsibility for ourselves, we ultimately gain control of our own recovery.

Send us your letters

If you wish, you can send us your dummy letters for publication here on the FirstSigns website. All letters will be published anonymously but please do not use real names or other personally identifiable information within your letters.

Email your letters to letters@firstsigns.org.uk

We will not keep any record of your email, and will simply publish your letters at www.firstsigns.org.uk/out/letters.html in a matter of days / weeks. Letters may also appear in our Blog and within our Newsletter.

We reserve the right to edit letters submitted which may include removing any graphic, triggering or inappropriate content.

{Wedge}

But Christmas can be expensive. How many times have you had to break your budget to be able to get the gifts you want, or enough gifts for everyone? Each year it feels like new people get added to your Christmas list – there’s never quite enough money or time in December is there? Even cards cost a lot when you think about all the ones you need to post out.

May I suggest that we need to pop into town, and online, to get some gift ideas now, and to buy one or two? By buying now, you get to pick up some pre-Christmas bargains and you’re spreading the cost of Christmas – otherwise you end up paying for Christmas all out of one wage packet!

Some people are talented and can save money by making cards and gifts, but many of us are not so patient or crafty! I know I couldn’t make anything that I’d be proud enough to give as a gift – whereas Jules could indeed make cards and gifts to a professional standard. Would making stuff save you money, or would you end up spending more on the materials?

Save money, reduce the hassle

Get online, visit Amazon, Firebox, ThinkGeek, Giftology and Play and buy some stuff early. If you leave it all to December you’ll end up buying everything out of one wage packet and that could hurt your finances.

Buy half your cards now, and some stamps. You can buy more, if you need, in December.

It’s not my place to lecture about the use of credit cards – I do use them for big purchases, very occasionally, but I don’t mind telling you that I’ve been made miserable by credit card bills and I totally totally avoid using them if I can – I do not believe they are worth the overall cost – their interest rates are sky high!

Personally I would rather receive something small (cheap!) unique and novel (something I’ve never seen) than an expensive helicopter toy or a deluxe board game. I can buy the usual highstreet things myself anytime, the most fun thing about Christmas for me is getting cool little things that make me go “Wow, I wish I’d thought of that!”.

So, if you’re celebrating Christmas (not everyone does!), Hanukkah, Yule or the winter solstice with gift giving, get out there now before the streets become too crowded, and save yourself the cost and hassle of shopping in December.

{Wedge}

Photo credit: Jill Clardy

As of today, we are pleased to welcome two new message board mods to our Team. Sartor resartus and FReedomFRIES have joined our Moderating Team. Both sartor resartus and FreedomFRIES are long-standing, valuable members of FirstSigns; they are well liked and respected by members and mods alike, and it’s super to have them join our Team.

Our Mod team work exceptionally hard to keep our message board safe and friendly, and we wouldn’t have a message board without them. They work incredibly hard behind the scenes and volunteer their time for free.

As you know, I run FirstSigns with Wedge. Not just the message board, but the entire organisation. It takes up a great deal of my / our time, and so our mods are vitally important. They do so much of the work that I simply don’t have time to do because I’m busy with other FirstSigns work.

Thanks to the dedication of our mod team, and the fantastic members we have, the majority of mod duties are positive ones. It’s not often we have problems on the board, and our members are happy and comfortable respecting our strict(ish) rules. Our message board is not like others on the web – we really do care about the safety and wellbeing of our members and our rules and guidelines reflect this.

We have a vibrant, friendly community of members who take time to care and support each other, as well as gaining support for themselves during difficult times. We’re proud of our board, and we’re proud of our members.

Some other great message board news is that staralfur has kindly agreed to be our new Mod Team Leader. Staralfur will be taking on more responsibility and helping me with some of the numerous admin duties involved with running a message board. It’s fantastic to have her!

Thank you to our wonderful new mods for joining us, thank you to staralfur for taking on the extra responsibility, thank you to our dedicated mod team for keeping the message board running, and thank you to all our loyal members who make it all worthwhile.

But, on the other hand, thousands of ‘me too’ websites (that copy ideas) pop up and claim to be ‘championing change’ or ‘making things better’ for people, and basically they do this by publishing a few pages about something they, the author, doesn’t like. They want something ‘better’, they want people to be treated with more ‘respect’ but they don’t really have an action plan, any objectives or any real purpose – other than to give the author a voice about what they don’t like.

Our organisation started like that, so I’m not knocking the passionate people who publish their blogs, their ideas and their concerns. But it takes more than a couple of articles and a petition to create change in the real world. A website is not an organisation. An organisation has, well, it has a structure of people working together for a common goal. A website mostly just has some writers.

FirstSigns, or ‘LifeSIGNS’ as I called it when we launched in May 2002, started as a website with ideas and rants and concerns, but there were always multiple people involved, and we were a committee of interested people with set objectives and a desire to change the world, for real.

But, now we’re in 2009, it’s easier than ever to publish a professional looking website, even if it never gets updated and the owners and writers have basically given up and moved on. How can you tell the difference between a website that’s been thrown online, and an organisation that adheres to standards and its internal policies?

I would suggest that a real organisation has a real-life presence – no, it doesn’t have to be an office on Fleet Street, but an organisation should be available to newspapers, radio and TV – website owners are notoriously shy, perhaps even using a fake name, but those people in a real organisation would be happy to have their photo taken for a magazine interview. A real organisation should have a real impact on the world – by offering tangible materials, not just web pages. Books, leaflets, fact sheets, pens, etc. are obvious ideas, but in reality, an organisation needs to work with real people in real life to have an impact. Basically, no organisation is an island, whereas a website can exist in a vacuum quite easily.

Training and partnership, that’s what I’m talking about. A real organisation can offer valuable services to other organisations. For instance, beyond the fact that FirstSigns’ fact sheets have been re-published in book form across the world and used in many NHS areas of the UK, we offer training to doctors, nurses, counsellors and professional health-care workers. We often travel up and down the UK to visit NHS PCTs. We also speak at conferences, sometimes for hours!

My name is Wedge, that’s my real name. We don’t use surnames on the web to help protect our private lives and our loved ones, but Jules and I have appeared in countless magazines, papers, journals, TV and radio shows, talking about self-injury / self-harm and what we’ve learnt from our members’ experiences.

We regularly meet with people in other organisations, doctors, policy makers – even politicians occasionally, and our training package is unique, because it’s written and presented by people who have personal experience of self-injury – us.

The key differences between a website and an organisation

• a website can launch over-night, with virtually no planning or objective;
• an organisation requires a set structure and a clear objective;
• a website can be run by just one person;
• most organisations are run by several people;
• a website is owned by just one person who dictates what goes on regardless of other people’s feelings;
• most organisations are taken care of by a committee of people who stick to agreed policies that direct how they treat people;
• it can be hard for a website owner to keep their website up to date with fresh, relevant, content;
• an organisation involves more people in creating content that is meaningful to members and visitors;
• a website costs very very little to run in the first year unless it becomes hugely popular (which is impossible for a website that is never updated!)
• an organisation can have varying costs – their website being just one small part of the running and project costs;
• the people behind a website might be invisible, perhaps impossible to contact;
• an organisation will provide several contact methods, including a professional email system and a phone number at least;
• a website offers information and online services;
• an organisations offers online services and real-life services, such as books, posters, bracelets, training, consultation, conference speaking – basically, you can meet with an organisation.

Help us change the world, get involved with our work, help run our organisation, help promote our information within schools and colleges and the NHS. Help us survive for another seven years, help us grow and reach more people. Self-injury shouldn’t be suffered in silence; with your help we can smash the shame and help people feel confident enough to get support and make changes in their lives.

That’s what Jules and I are doing; it takes time and effort, but it’s the only way forward.

Wedge

Image credit: Elven*Nicky

If you would like to tweet or share this article, the short address is: http://blog.firstsigns.org.uk/yw

You can subscribe to this blog, so that you can automatically keep up with us, using the little square icon at the top-right of this page. But please ‘follow’ us on Twitter so we can have a chat sometime: http://twitter.com/FirstSigns

But don’t wait to interact! Comment on this article below! What do you think about websites that ’say’ they are ‘official’ but don’t actually do any work?

Unfortunately, although scars may fade in time, they are permanent. However, there are things you can do either to reduce the severity of scaring, or to camouflage the scars you are left with. Thanks to Denice (aka moderator D-Elle on our Message Board) we now have two new pages on our website.

Written by Denice, and expanded by Wedge, we now have a page on Scar Reduction which details various methods of reducing the vividness and texture of scars. In addition, we have a page on Skin Camouflage, in which Denice helpfully talks about her own personal experiences of camouflaging scars with make-up. Both pages are located within our Helping You section.

We hope you will find these two new pages helpful and, as always, welcome your comments.

Many thanks to Denice for writing for us. If you have something self-harm related that you’d like to share with our members, then please do email Jules@FirstSigns.org.uk

Follow @FirstSigns on Twitter for all the latest news and views.

Of course FirstSigns agreed to help (we always do!) and we sent out a media request straight away. We had a good response and Rosie came back to me to say she would be interviewing one of our members, Izzy, who had kindly volunteered. Rosie also wanted to interview me to get a feel for what FirstSigns does and to chat about our views on self-injury.

Rosie and I had a long chat and discussed many different areas surrounding self-injury, but considering the main focus of the article, I’m not surprised by the quote Rosie chose to publish. I feel the article clearly demonstrates the pressures people can face when they have such very high expectations of themselves, and how that pressure can lead to self-injury.

At FirstSigns we know that perfectionism and the pressure to maintain impossibly high standards is immense, and as nobody is perfect then failure is inevitable. Self-injury can release some of that pressure and provide a sense of relief.

There might be some who would criticise the article for focusing on women, for focusing on only one reason for self-injury, and for predictably printing a picture of Amy Winehouse(!) But although at FirstSigns we see the bigger picture on a daily basis, the important thing is that self-injury is being talked about; and in one of the glossies too!

Yes, we know that there are likely as many men who self-injure as women; we know that there are endless reasons why a person might turn to self-injury in order to cope, and we know that statistics can be questionable. But not so long ago the only media coverage of self-injury was in the tabloids and equivalent magazines, and it almost always focused on teenagers. And before that it was non-existent.

There’s nothing wrong with an article focusing on one area of self-injury, especially one that’s been frequently ignored in the past. So I for one am very proud to be quoted, and for FirstSigns’ web address to be printed, in a mature and awareness raising article, published in a quality magazine. Who knows, maybe it will encourage those male magazines to think about how many of their readers might be hurting themselves too.

Thank you to Rosie for taking the time to talk to FirstSigns and to our member Izzy for volunteering.

If you’d like to read the article you can find it on pages 85 / 86 of the September issue of Cosmopolitan Magazine (out today), and maybe you’d like to share your own thoughts and experiences with us. Your comments are always welcome.

Wedge founded our organisation over seven years ago; and we really are changing the world :)

Audio Comments

Listen to Wedge talk about our new blog and our appearance in Cosmo.