How long has “cutting yourself” been around?
It’s impossible to know when self-harm began, because the very nature of it is furtive and secretive, apart from in those people for whom it is a cry for attention – and there are many less people who display their wounds than who obsessively hide and deny them. It’s important to understand that in years gone by, it was much easier to hurt yourself. You just went to war. Or annoyed someone with a weapon. Or you took drugs, in the times when opiates were widely and legally available. But these days, we have not only the depression, anxiety and self-loathing that is the basis for self-harm – those things have been around, I presume, for as long as humans have – but we also have a culture which doesn’t allow people to show weakness, which expects people to achieve everything, to fail at nothing, and to do it all without seeming at all affected by the stress. It’s the pressure to seem and be perfect that has lead to the increase, in the past few decades, of people harming themselves. If yo
