On the Web, self-injurers find help, good and bad
By Noah Larsen
Patricia Adler, Professor of Sociology
The internet can be a lot of things to a lot of people; for self-injurers, often self-described loners, it can be a place to find a community. University of Colorado Sociology professor Patricia Adler explores this topic in a piece she co-wrote with Peter Adler of University of Denver, called “The Cyber Worlds of Self-Injurers: Deviant Communities, Relationships, and Selves.”
Self-injury is described as “the deliberate, nonsuicidal destruction of one’s own body tissue, incorporating practices such as self-cutting, burning, branding, scratching, picking at skin or reopening wounds, biting, head banging, hair pulling (trichotillomania), hitting (with hammer or other object), and bone breaking.”
As part of the study, 81in-depth interviews were conducted, and tens of thousands of Internet messages and emails were collected and coded. The interviewees, who ranged in age from 16 to their mid-50s, were mostly women and Caucasian.
When looking at internet communities used by self-injurers, the study found that they were wide raging in their purpose and style. Some offered help, some allowed venting, and some were more pro-self-injury.
Self-injurers weigh many factors before selecting a community that fits, and many times would select more than one community to fill different needs. Linda, for instance, is a member of a community that is based on recovering, and another one that allows her to vent freely when she needs to.
Users of the communities tend to drift from one community to another. “People dropped in when they were having trouble and left when they were excessively triggered or felt able to cope without the group support,” the study states.
Often times, this had a profound impact on the relationships that were formed online. It was not uncommon for two people to meet through an online community, become fast friends, only to have that friendship terminated instantly when one or both of the individuals moved on from the group.
In other instances, these relationships became romantic and transformed into real-life partnerships that ended with one of the members being taken advantage of. One of the interviewed subjects, Nancy, met a man who grew into her online boyfriend.
The two set up a meeting in real life, but when he arrived, he brought with him a female friend. The next day while Nancy was at work, the two visitors “cleaned out her apartment, stole her identity, and ended up making charges of $30,000 against her credit cards and bank account.”
While some relationships ended poorly, others didn’t, and it was sometimes the case that online relationships helped the user manage real-life relationships more easily. Tim, another interviewee, states, “First I was a loner in real life, so I was glued to the cyber world, and even I made up a fake me: tall, muscles and so on. But now I honestly have a group of friends that we do stuff well when we have money and thats like never. lol.”
Patricia Adler has been a professor in sociology at the University of Colorado since 1999. She was the co-president of the Midwest Sociological Society from 2005-2007 and has co-written 11 books.
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