Self-harm is called self-harm, mutilation, harm to health, including the creation of conditions for a strong exacerbation of existing diseases. In most cases, self-mutilation is practiced in order to evade military service, to achieve better conditions in places of detention, etc.
According to the legislation of the Russian Federation, criminal punishment for self-mutilation occurs when a conscript serviceman or a conscript wants to obtain exemption from military service for medical reasons in this way. People with mental illness in times of crisis can harm themselves without realizing it. These types of self-harm are referred to as symptoms of mental illness.
Self-harm can be a symptom of the following mental illnesses: personality disorder, bipolar disorder, clinical depression, psychosis, schizophrenia.
Types of self-harm
During the Great Patriotic War, soldiers of the Red Army often shot themselves in the arm or leg in order not to fight, to save their lives and to lie down in the hospital. Or even just book it out and go home.
In our times, the methods of self-harm have become more diverse: inflicting wounds with melee weapons, piercing and cutting objects, transport and other mechanisms, taking medicinal or poisonous substances inside or injecting under the skin, and many others.
Often they try to disguise self-harm as deliberate harm to health by unknown persons. For this, harm to health is inflicted by other persons at the request of the perpetrator or with his consent. In this case, if the fact of self-harm is revealed, the persons who directly inflicted the damage are involved in the criminal case as accomplices.
Simulation of various diseases is often used: prolapse of the rectum, hernia, skin diseases, diseases of the eyes, ears, lungs, gastrointestinal tract. Drugs and other substances are deliberately taken by mouth to artificially induce disease. Starving, refusing to take vitamins. Artificially fix the joints for a long time in order to cause his contracture.
There are cases of self-harm in order to create the credibility of some other crime: rape, robbery or assault.
Mental illness
Self-harm is common among adolescents and women who do not try to avoid something. And they don't even try to end their life. For them, self-harm becomes a way of expressing mental pain, psychological trauma, gradually developing into a kind of addiction.
Thus, by harming themselves, "self-harm" try to cope with their emotions, get out of stress or emotional numbness. According to the research carried out, persons who have experienced sexual or physical violence in childhood often become such "self-injurious". However, there are cases when people with certain biochemical changes in the brain were disposed to self-harm.
Passion for self-harm is not a bad habit, but a disease. Therefore, in order to get rid of the urge to harm yourself, you will not be able to use the usual methods of dealing with bad habits.
To help a person prone to self-harm, he must be persuaded to visit a psychologist or psychiatrist. If the cause of self-harm is an experienced mental trauma, doctors try to remove its consequences. Prescribe a course of antidepressant medication, teach alternative methods of dealing with stress and managing their emotions. Partial hospitalization, cognitive and behavioral therapy, interpersonal therapy, family therapy with the involvement of the patient's relatives bring good results.
