The secret history of self-harmThe secret history of self-harm
All In The Mind
After self-harming as a teenager, a historian delves into the past for some important insights into how we can better manage and treat those who self-harm today.
28:51•23 Apr 2017
The Secret History of Self-Harm and Why Our Assumptions Matter
Episode Overview
- Self-harm has a long and varied history and is not simply a modern epidemic.
- Medical and cultural beliefs, especially around hysteria and gender, have strongly influenced how self-injury is judged.
- Practices such as religious self-flagellation and reported self-castration reflect their own eras’ spiritual and social values rather than current ideas of pathology.
- Questioning assumptions about motives, gender and media influence can lead to more thoughtful and less blaming responses to self-harm.
- Listening to the person’s experience, rather than focusing only on the visible injuries, is central to offering meaningful support.
“I think helping them to listen is one of the main things.”
Curious about how others manage their mental health struggles? This episode of All In The Mind focuses on historian and researcher Sarah Chaney, whose teenage experiences of self-harm led her to ask hard questions about what this behaviour really means and how it’s been understood over time. You’ll hear Sarah describe starting to hurt herself at 13 or 14 through cutting, burning and biting, using pain and blood as a kind of "visible release" when worries felt overwhelming.
She speaks frankly about hiding her scars for years, and how finally writing about them became an important part of her work on the history of psychiatry. From there, the conversation widens out. Sarah traces how self-harm has been framed from the 1860s onwards—through Victorian ideas of "self-mutilation", religious practices like self-flagellation, and the medical fascination with self-castration, often based on shaky evidence and strong cultural fears.
She shows how gender stereotypes and diagnoses such as hysteria and later borderline personality disorder helped cement the belief that women who self-injure are attention-seeking or manipulative. Host Lynne Malcolm guides the discussion towards what this long history might mean for people who self-harm today. Sarah argues that context matters and that many of our modern assumptions, including panic about the internet and "copying" behaviour, reflect social anxieties more than they explain distress.
Her emphasis is clear: "I think helping them to listen is one of the main things" families and professionals can do. She also talks about finding research unexpectedly therapeutic, giving her a new way to work with fears and questions that once led to injury. For anyone interested in mental health, self-harm, or how past beliefs still shape current treatment, this episode offers a thoughtful mix of personal story and historical detail.
It might leave you asking: what assumptions about self-harm are you carrying without realising?
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