By Veronica Heney, Co-Lead of the Narrative Practices Lab, Discovery Research Platform for Medical Humanities
It can be easy to take for granted that self-harm is shameful – that people who self-harm would inevitably feel ashamed that this is a practice they engage in. Yet this assumption means that we don’t pay attention to why self-harm can feel shameful, or how it becomes shameful.
In a new paper published in Literature and Medicine, I suggest that seeing self-harm as inherently shameful can do a real disservice to people who self-harm. I argue that actually, while shame can be a big part of experiences of self-harm we shouldn’t take it for granted – partly because for some people self-harm doesn’t feel shameful all the time or in the same way. For instance people talked about places or situations where self-harm might feel more or less shameful. They told me that other experiences, such as binge eating, felt shameful and in contrast self-harm did not. This means that we need to think carefully about how and why self-harm becomes shameful – I think that one of the main ways this happens is through narratives, and particularly through the way self-harm is represented in fiction.
In the paper I explore some of the perspectives of participants in my PhD research, who all had experience of self-harm and who talked to me about how it is represented in fiction. Alongside their thoughts I write about the Tim Blake Nelson film Anesthesia (2015), in which Kristen Stewart plays Sophie, a young graduate student who is self-harming. Through the film and the data I outline three key ways that fiction constructs self-harm as shameful.
First, I argue that books, TV shows, and films, often position self-harming characters as a particular “type” of person, through the way they portray them before they show them self-harming. Characters who go on to self-harm are already established as broken, as pathetic, as immature, and as weird – in essence, as shameful. These characteristics then blur with the self-harm itself, so that self-harm takes on these meanings and the associated shame. This is a shame which easily spreads beyond the fictional text – for readers and viewers who self-harm themselves it can feel inevitable that they belong to the “type”, that their self-harm makes them a shameful type of person.
Second, I talk about how self-harm is positioned within a narrative – specifically I notice how often self-harm is discovered by or revealed to other characters. This is a structure which makes self-harm seem like it is something to be judged – even if other characters respond kindly and with concern. To be judged, even implicitly, silently, is to be ashamed, to be shameful.
Finally I talked about sentimentality, genre, and bad art. Some participants felt it was particularly shameful when self-harm was associated with fiction that they judged to be bad, and that they felt others would see similarly. If the story of self-harm seems hackneyed, sentimental, and trite when it’s told in fiction, then it can feel like that’s the sort of story that people who self-harm want to tell about themselves. Just by self-harming you can put yourself within that story no matter how you actually talk about or understand your experience. Self-harm becomes perceived not as a sign of suffering but a sign of melodrama, or worse of being melodramatic.
As these examples show, shame can be a tricky, sticky emotion – it can spread to us to easily, it can be hard to get rid of. It can feel hard to pin down or tease apart. Paying attention to narratives and how they work can be an important part of understanding these processes. But this doesn’t mean that our aim must always be avoiding shame or escaping it. One participant, Siobhan talked really movingly about the parts of her experience of self-harm that felt shameful, that weren’t glamorous or beautiful or useful. For Siobhan, a ‘good’ representation of self-harm needed to pay attention to those difficult moments and feelings. In this article I try to do that – to look carefully at the way that shame is complex and ambivalent, to see its intensity, its uncertainty, its multiplicity. To fail to take shame seriously – now that would be a shame indeed.
