Wednesday, March 1st was Self-Injury Awareness Day which aimed to promote understanding and compassion for those who struggle with self-injury.
Self-Injury is a deliberate act of harming one’s body to cope with difficult emotions or experiences. This behaviour can take various forms, including cutting, burning, hitting oneself, or other self-injury methods. These types of self-injury are a harmful way to cope with a range of emotions.
At Keys Group, we have a Specialist Advisor for Self-Injurious Behaviour, Helen Stewart.
Helen works closely with Keys Group Clinical Director and Therapists to offer advice, strategies, and staff training to identify self-injury patterns and behaviours. This training helps reduce risks and supports young people with empathy and understanding from the teams that are working with the young people.
We ensure we do as much as possible to help young people reduce or stop injuring themselves. However, when it does occur it is essential that staff can recognise potentially risky situations are developing and respond effectively. Staff within Keys ensure they are aware of effective individual strategies for any young people who show signs of self-injurious behaviour, and we have systems in place to help prevent potential risks of self-injury.
Helen’s specialist approach has been instrumental in helping Begdale Manager Mark Dodds and his team over the last four years to understand self-injury and why one young person, might be doing it. Throughout the young person’s journey with self-injury, Helen consistently offered guidance, support and reassurance, not only to the young person but also to their support system of key workers and house staff by helping them to make changes and build strong relationships.
The team have been on hand to deal with all realities of self-injurious behaviour and have put in place different mechanisms suggested over the years such as bear cards, soothe boxes, journals and the use of apps such as Kooth and Calm Harm.
Through the work that the team has done the young person is in a much better place and self-injury has dramatically improved.
We will be detailing more about what our specialist team do over the coming months as well as sharing more details on Keys Connect.
