Dr Veronica Heney from our Institute for Medical Humanities and Department of Sociology has been awarded a Wellcome Early Career Award to re-configure understandings of self-harm.
Self-harm is a common experience. Around 6.4% of the UK population report having self-harmed in their lifetime, with rates rising.
Current medical practices and public health policies like the 2023 Online Safety Act, which prohibits content encouraging self-harm, prioritise prevention.
Dr Heney’s 5-year project will move beyond quantitative, risk-centric approaches and instead centre lived experience and creative methods to improve understandings.
It responds to existing failures of care, seeking more nuanced and supportive responses to self-harm across community action, healthcare practice, and policy.
Dr Heney’s project challenges assumptions about how self-harm is located in and influenced by culture.
One strand will draw on lived experience perspectives to re-examine the evidence for ‘the narrative of social contagion’ – the idea that exposure to self-harm via peers, groups or media increases the likelihood that someone will adopt or imitate those behaviours.
The project will also work with people who self-harm to co-create visual art, exploring collage as a mode of engagement with experience, and draw on insights from fiction to co-develop a new, collective vision for self-harm care.
This prestigious award further consolidates Durham as a world-leader in participatory methods and in interdisciplinary and cross-sector health research that centres lived experience.
Many people who seek medical support for self-harm report poor treatment, including discriminatory attitudes and a lack of empathy. By putting experiential knowledge and co-creation at the heart of research, this award provides an exciting opportunity to build long-term, meaningful collaborations with communities and third sector organisations that will change how self-harm is researched, cared-for and understood.
Our Department of Sociology is renowned for its excellence in collaborative and community-led research on health and social justice. We’re delighted to see the launch of Dr Heney’s innovative project, which will extend and build upon this work.
'Re-knowing Self-harm' runs until March 2031, hosted by our Institute for Medical Humanities and Department of Sociology.
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