Self-Injury and the Internet. Reconfiguring the Therapeutic Community

Previous models of therapeutic treatment for self-injury have been focused on individualistic psycho-medical approaches that isolate and stigmatize people who cut, burn, and otherwise self-harm. The rise of cyber communities of self-injury, beginning in the early 2000s but evolving dramatically over the first decade of the twenty-first century, has offered a diversity of groups that individuals can join, cycling through different ones as their movement through their career of self-injury evolves. These groups offer a significantly different set of norms and values relating to self-injury, engaging in some combination of defining it, normalizing it, supporting it, and offering a range of techniques for combatting it. In this article we discuss the various ways different people participate in these cyber communities, their relationships between the cyber and face-to-face worlds, and the effects of the Internet on self-injury. We conclude by discussing the instrumental and expressive effects of cyber self-injury support groups, and the way these groups function to normalize the behavior and foster its moral passage.