Understanding People’s Lived Experience of Self-injury
As can be seen within another of our lab’s project domains, our research aims to shed needed light on a range of mental health adversities with emphasis on people’s lived experience. A particular focus within this work, however, is on understanding people’s lived experience of self-injury. Through a number of our recent papers in the field, outreach work, and countless conversations diverse stakeholders, it is clear that people with lived experience have myriad views and concerns that had been conspicuously underrepresented in mainstream research. Our team has thus endeavoured to better understand these concerns by directly drawing on lived experience views - both when informing our research and in the process of research itself. To accomplish this, we draw on participatory and qualitative research methods. Efforts from our research have shed needed light on numerous under-represented yet salient topics, including but not limited to disclosure (e.g., Rosenrot & Lewis, 2019; Michlels, 2022, 2023a, 2023b), scarring (e.g., Lewis, 2016; Lewis & Mehrabkhani, 2015), stigma (e.g., Staniland et al., 2020, 2021, 2022), and recovery (e.g., Lewis et al., 2019; Meheli & Lewis, 2022; Farrell et al., 2023).
A highlight from our work and that of Dr. Penny Hasking (Curtin University) is the development of a novel, strengths-based model of self-injury recovery (Lewis & Hasking, 2020;). This framework and its underlying research were also the impetus for a recently published book (Lewis & Hasking, 2023) and clinical recommendations for applied psychologists and trainees (Hasking et al., 2023).
Through our research in this space, we aim to give overdue voice to concerns that are relevant to people’s everyday lives and foster needed change in the way self-injury is discussed, conceptualised, and how people are ultimately responded to and supported. As can be seen throughout other areas within our research projects, this is a multi-pronged yet critical mission.
Please see our Publications page for a list of papers in this stream.