I'm going to preface this by saying I have never experienced clinical depression or the need for self harm. However, my sister has bipolar disorder and I grew up with her attempting suicide multiple times and using cutting as a tool to cope.

So, many depressed individuals use self harm as a way of taking control of pain they feel is uncontrollable and insurmountable; it's not a means of failed suicide, it's a form of coping. Do you think someday controlled methods of self harm will be utilized for victims of depression? I'm talking about using doctor-recommended (not necessarily prescribed), safe methods of self-harm to control symptoms. Cutting itself is a non-lethal methods that could potentially be used.

It sounds ridiculous, but I've recently been looking at it from a new light. In my adolescence I suffered from chronic migraines: almost every day during middle school I'd come home and lay in a dark, quiet place waiting for my daily migraine to pass. A technique my neurologist taught me was to pinch a nerve between my thumb and pointer finger, in the webbing of your hand, to dull the pain since your body only registers one significant pain at a time. I still use that technique today, and I don't really see how it's at all different from some other forms of self harm, except that a doctor told me it was okay. (Not to conflate migraines with depression; I'm merely talking about the function of each action.)

Share your thoughts on this. I apologize for typos; I did this all on mobile without proofreading.

A technique my neurologist taught me was to pinch a nerve between my thumb and pointer finger, in the webbing of your hand, to dull the pain since your body only registers one significant pain at a time. I still use that technique today, and I don't really see how it's at all different from some other forms of self harm, except that a doctor told me it was okay.

Oh shit I developed a similar technique of my own, I pinch really hard on my ear lobes, because I theorized it would flood my nervous system with meaningless information so that pain signals wouldn't be detected, but I feared it was just a placebo.

The difference in my eyes is that there really isn't any harm, there's no damage at all, whereas as actual self harm is by definition something that damages your body. I figure the best way to treat someone with a mental illness is to encourage them to living more like a normal person, than to encourage "unique" actions like self harm.

Self harm doesn't have a root, singular cause. Like depression, it comes for different reasons. For some people, it's a psychological self hate that manifests itself. Usually, when somebody has an abusive parent, especially a father, a child will grow up to hate their father.

But, in their sub-conscious, because of the parental bond that every single child has with their parents, they hate themselves, for hating their parent, because it's practically programmed into them not to feel that way against their guardians.

Another aspect, of course, appears in trans-genderism. Feeling like you exist in the wrong kind of body will do that to you over time.

Another one is rape victims. Some of them loathe themselves, because rape is all about power. Particularily in men, who have testosterone and that natural sort of domineering nature. They loathe themselves and feel guilty about being put into such a position beyond their power to stop.

So, with such a broad area as to why it can occur, it makes the root of self harm incredibly difficult to pin down in individual people. And I'd have no doubt that theraputic self harm won't come round for a long time. Mainly because there are so many different shades to psychology.

As long as there's some research from the medical community suggesting ways of doing it safely, and assuming that the people perform it safely, I can't say I wouldn't support something like this. I have a lot of experience with depressed people, but very few who actually ever self-harmed.