Nina Fellows explores shifting portrayals of self-harm in Anglophone films and the clinical implications of such representation.
This article contains discussions of self-harm and its depiction.
If you’ve ever seen self-harm depicted in media, you’ve probably encountered the following story. A teenage girl or young woman from an average suburban home is experiencing emotional difficulties related to her coming-of-age. Maybe she’s being bullied at school, or fighting with her parents, or struggling with her sexuality. It’s revealed that she’s self-harming in response to these problems, and this revelation is presented either suggestively – she pulls down her sleeve to hide the scratches on her wrist – or explicitly: in a dramatic scene, she retreats to a bathroom or bedroom with a sharp object and slashes at herself before falling back in a stupor. As the story unfolds, she tries and fails to conceal her self-harm, provoking a mix of scorn and sympathy from those around her. Eventually, if her story has a happy ending, she sees a psychiatrist who teaches her to express her feelings properly, and her socio-emotional conflicts are worked out. She’s returned to normalcy, where her self-harm is no longer necessary.
This story has been repeated across films, books, television shows, and news media since the millennium, and while it isn’t the only kind of story about self-harm that gets told, it’s certainly been influential. The popularity of this sort of narrative coincided with a sudden cultural fascination with self-harm which emerged in the 1990s, and which corresponded with an increase in rates of self-harm among young people in Western countries. Consequently, a specific image of what self-harm looks like, what it’s for, and who it belongs to, developed during the 1990s and early 2000s, with major consequences for how self-harm is thought about and treated today. The assumption that self-harm is primarily a problem among young white women who practice it for reasons related to self-esteem and other difficulties associated with adolescence is a stereotype which has effectively obscured the many other demographics among whom self-harm rates are also high (Chandler, 2011): young men, Black and minority ethnic women, detained asylum seekers and people in prison are all underserved by the dominant discourse on self-harm.
I suspect that the millennial media construction of self-harm hasn’t done much for young white women either – through self-harm’s association with femininity and immaturity, and its normalisation as an expected feature of modern adolescence, it often attracts negative and dismissive responses. This is documented in the many studies on self-harm stigma among healthcare staff, who tend to view people who self-harm as manipulative and attention-seeking (e.g. Karman et al., 2015); the frustration and lack of empathy experienced by those who encounter self-harm is likely rooted in misunderstandings generated within both popular culture and medical discourse.
It has been established that the way self-harm gets represented in clinical literature and popular culture, and the way it’s actually experienced by people who practice it, often diverge considerably (Chandler, 2011, 2012). In recent years, critical attention has been given to the need for diversity in media representations of self-harm which more accurately represent the range of lived experiences associated with the practice (Heney, 2020, 2022). Important scholarship has also mapped how different clinical and cultural representations of self-harm are the products of material and institutional factors converging with specific historical concerns (Millard, 2015; Chaney, 2017). Building on this, my doctoral research examines the construction of self-harm in the cultural imaginary before, during, and after self-harm emerged into general public awareness during the 1990s. To investigate this, I use a feminist-psychoanalytic approach to analyse Anglophone films from the 1970s to the 2000s which feature scenes of self-harm. I’m also interviewing women who practiced self-harm themselves during the 1990s, in order to understand the relationship between their lived experiences and the depiction of similar experiences in media which were proliferating at the time.
What I’m finding in this work is a deep incongruity between experience and representation that occurs within the complex relationship between bodies and images – particularly the bodies of women in pain, and the images of those bodies produced and consumed in Western popular culture. As contemporary discourse on self-harm turns to the problem of censorship and the availability of dangerous images to impressionable young people, it’s increasingly important to understand the modern history of self-harm images and the fears, fantasies, and desires that they engage.
Prior to the 1990s, scenes from films in which a character non-fatally injures themselves were most common in erotic thrillers, historical dramas, and body horror films. Think of Debbie Harry’s sadomasochistic character burning herself with a cigarette in Videodrome (1983); a penitent medieval monk whipping himself after a sexual tryst in The Name of the Rose (1986); or the psychiatric patient with delusional parasitosis mutilating himself with a razor in Hellraiser II (1988). These films associate self-harm with sexual perversion, psychotic delusion, and archaic ritualism which doesn’t belong in normal life. In these films, self-harm is abject.
Julia Kristeva (1982) defines the abject as the quality of things which provoke in us an instinctive reaction of disgust or horror, because they confront us with the materiality of our existence and our repressed fears of mortality. Acts of self-harm are represented as visceral, shocking, and bizarre – certainly not something practiced by suburbanite teenagers in their family homes. Notable exceptions to this trend are Equus (1977) and I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (1977), which both centre on adolescents undergoing inpatient psychiatric treatment for mental illness. These teenagers injure themselves ritualistically, in connection to an imagined or hallucinated tribalistic fantasy world; both films are influenced by, and clear expressions of, psychoanalytic ideas. In any case, self-harm in pre-1990s cinema denotes a transgression of boundaries, functioning as a figurative or literal portal to another world; it signifies absolute abjection, and reliably concludes with either the radical rehabilitation or, more commonly, the death of the self-harming character.
These pre-1990s representations were produced before ‘self-harm’ existed as we know it today, with its particular psychological and demographic connotations. Understandings of self-harm began to change in the 1990s when it became the subject of a number of media representations. As celebrities publicly confessed to engaging in self-harm, most notably Princess Diana in her 1995 televised BBC interview, it entered a new era of visibility.
Self-harm appeared in print via a crop of young adult novels (e.g. Shelley Stoehr’s Crosses, 1991), women’s memoirs (Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted, 1993, and Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation, 1994, both later adapted into popular films), and general interest books by psychiatrists (Armando Favazza’s Bodies Under Siege, 1987, 1996; Steven Levenkron’s The Luckiest Girl in the World, 1997), journalists (Marilee Strong’s A Bright Red Scream, 1998), and feminist psychologists (Mary Pipher’s Reviving Ophelia, 1994). In the late 1990s and early 2000s came a new wave of cinematic depictions of self-harm which focused on young women and their social-emotional struggles: Girl, Interrupted (1999), Secret Cutting (2000), Prozac Nation (2001), Secretary (2002), and Thirteen (2003), among others. While the stories (both real and fictional) in these books and films contained some variances in characterising the practice, taken together, they formed an impression in the Western cultural imaginary of self-harm as a method of emotional regulation and expression among unhappy girls. This engendered a moral panic: like eating disorders, precocious sexual activity, and drug use, at the turn of the century, self-harm was the latest risky adolescent misbehaviour which adults ought to learn about and invigilate against.
Through this renegotiation of meaning, self-harm, with its pre-existing cultural connotations of horror, perversion, and insanity, became something which occurs in schools and homes. Previously associated with extreme subcultural, sexual, or ritual practices, self-harm was afforded a psychological explanation, supported by the contemporaneous clinical literature, which contained a solution: individual therapy and psychiatric treatment. In the first-person narratives which dominated the 1990s wave of self-harm media, psychiatry is commonly positioned as the only corrective force which could return a self-harming girl to sanity. These texts often employ a female therapist character who represents the ‘omnipotent phallic mother’ (Bareiss, 2017) – a rational maternal force who helps the girl liberate herself from the pressures placed on her by her actual mother or her social world, both of which prescribe modes of femininity the protagonist can’t conform to. Concurrent with third-wave feminism’s identification of the body as the primary site of political struggle (Karaian & Mitchell, 2010), the self-harming girl’s body is cast as embattled territory, and her injuries as the resulting shrapnel wounds. But while these texts raise critical questions about modern girlhood and the politicised female body, their conclusions just as often foreclose possibilities for subversion by defaulting to psychiatry as the only answer to the ‘problem’ of self-harm.
Kristeva claims that representations of the abject in art serve a social function: by screening encounters with that which horrifies us, we experience a cathartic pleasure while remediating our relationship to it and redrawing the boundary between the abject and the acceptable. The changing depictions of self-harm across late 20th century media are a great example of abjection in action. Self-harm’s evolution from ‘outrageous transgression in deviant adults’ to ‘emotional expression in troubled teens’ perhaps indicates a shift in cultural attitudes towards acceptance of non-normative behaviours. But the specific post-1990s self-harm narrative discussed here also produced a stereotype which still limits scholarship and healthcare provision today (Chandler 2011). Those experiences of self-harm which aren’t represented by the image of a young, white, Anglo-American woman practicing wrist-cutting are still functionally abjected from the cultural imaginary, persisting as an unrepresentable Other. And, as recent critical work has made clear, this stereotype – which is as much a function of clinical research as of cultural representation – contains fundamental misunderstandings about those of us who are ostensibly represented by the image in question. Images of self-harm aren’t bare reflections of reality; they work upon our expectations and anxieties, and have profound consequences for who gets seen, and how.
About the author
Nina Fellows is a PhD student at the Open University, funded by the Grand Union Doctoral Training Partnership, using a feminist-psychoanalytic approach to study the cultural emergence of self-harm in the 1990s. She has previously taught and researched at Manchester Metropolitan University. She can be found on X @nina_fellows
References
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Chandler, Amy. 2011. “The Construction of Self-Injury in the Clinical Literature: A Sociological Exploration.” Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior 41 (1): 98–109.
Chandler, Amy. 2012. “Self-Injury as Embodied Emotion Work: Managing Rationality, Emotions and Bodies.” Sociology 46 (3): 442–57. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038511422589.
Chaney, Sarah. 2017. Psyche on the Skin: A History of Self-Harm. Reaktion Books.
Heney, Veronica. 2020. “Unending and Uncertain: Thinking through a Phenomenological Consideration of Self-Harm towards a Feminist Understanding of Embodied Agency.” https://vc.bridgew.edu/jiws.
Karaian, Lara, and Mitchell, Allyson. 2010. “Third wave feminisms.” Feminist issues: Race, class and sexuality: 63-86.
Karman, Pieter; Kool, Nienke; Poslawsky, Irina E., van Meijel, Berno. 2015. “Nurses’ attitudes towards self-harm: A literature review.” Journal of Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing 22 (1): 65-75.
Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror : An Essay on Abjection. Columbia University Press.
Millard, Chris. 2015. A History of Self-Harm in Britain: A Genealogy of Cutting and Overdosing. Palgrave Macmillan.
