BMJ  2005;330:1026 (30 April), doi:10.1136/bmj.330.7498.1026

Letter

Self harm was misrepresented (again)

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

EDITOR—In 2002 the BMJ published a trial of a general practice based intervention to prevent repetition of deliberate self harm.¹ The article was illustrated by two pictures, one on the front cover of the paper version of the journal, which depicted self cutting. Readers pointed out that this was misleading because self poisoning (rather than self injury) made up the great majority of self harm episodes.²

Times have moved on. The terminology has changed—the qualifier "deliberate" has been dropped from "self harm" in response to the heterogeneous nature of the phenomenon and the concerns of service users,^{3 4}—but the choice of illustrative material seems to have remained the same.

The synopsis of our article on risk assessment after self harm in the BMJ was accompanied by a picture of a person about to cut himself or herself with a blade.⁵ The terms used to describe aspects of suicidal . . . [Full text of this article]

nav.kapur@manchester.ac.uk, Centre for Suicide Prevention, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Sciences, University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9PL

Centre for Suicide Prevention, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Sciences, University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9PL

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Correction

Navneet Kapur
bmj.com, 29 Apr 2005 [Full text]

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