Citation

Angelotta C. J. Nerv. Ment. Dis. 2015; 203(2): 75-80.

Affiliation

DeWitt Wallace Institute for the History of Psychiatry and Department of Psychiatry, Cornell University New York Presbyterian Hospital, New York, NY.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2015, Lippincott Williams and Wilkins)

DOI

10.1097/NMD.0000000000000243

PMID

25594789

Abstract

Nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI) is a newly proposed diagnostic category in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition. Some contemporary historiography dismisses NSSI as a fiction of modern psychiatry. Although the exact definition and psychological meaning attributed to self-harm has not been static over history, there is a clear thread that connects Western asylum psychiatrists' thinking about self-harm to the current stand-alone diagnostic category of NSSI. Nineteenth-century psychiatrists identified a clinically meaningful difference between self-harm with and without the intent to die, between self-injurers who were psychotic and those who were not, and between self-injurers who made a single, serious mutilation and those who repetitively self-injured without causing permanent bodily damage. These same distinctions are apparent in the definition of NSSI. Thus, NSSI is a formalization of long-held observations about a category of people who repetitively self-injure without suicidal intent.

Language: en