Recognizing and Responding to Those Who Self-Harm
Introduction
Self-harming has become more often than it used to be.
One of the contributing reasons is the increase in social problems that young people have to contend with.
Some of these challenges are;
-Student’s financial constraints
-Conflict at home between parents
-Lack of unity of direction and purpose in life (Sivertsen et al., 2019).
This presentation aims to discuss how educators can pinpoint self-harm indicators, solve it, and make an evidence-based follow-up.
Social problems have continually increased over time. This has led to increased pain among young people. As a result, they tend to seek maladaptive approaches to solve such problems. Increased in unsustainable livelihoods among young people can be attributed to low-income family financial models, increased conflict among parents, and lack of support system at school and the community at large (Sivertsen et al., 2019).
In this presentation, I intend to expand on how educators can notice self-harm indicators among students and solve them.
Indicators of Self-harm.
Self-isolation.
A surge in behavioral changes.
Constrained interaction with other learners in class.
Inability to concentrate in class in class and extra-activities
Reduced self-image and lack of confidence during class
Drop in performance (Patchin & Hinduja., 2017).
The first indicator that a student is contemplating self-harm is isolation from other classmates. According to Patchin and Hinduja (2017), when students are undergoing pain, they may have challenges confiding their issues to teachers or even their mates. Hence, they end up separating themselves from others. Also, students lose concertation in class, which lead to a drop in their grade. Consequently, such students are also likely to show a lack of confidence due to a tainted self-image. All these are indicators that educators can notice in the process of interacting with learners.
Interventions
Establishing a professional relationship with students
Establishing counseling centers within the institution
Building the bridges between students-students interaction
Setting a curriculum oriented towards helping students from self-harm
Role-playing in class
Engaging parents of highly distressed students (Cipriano et al., 2017).
One of the interventions that educators can adopt is to have a professional relationship with students such that they can be free to share the problem that they might be facing during the process of learning. In this case, and as noted by Cipriano et al. (2017), the relationship between teachers and learners means a lot because they create a conducive environment of sharing life challenges. Additionally, educators can focus on counseling by setting an office where students with different problems can help. Building on student-student relationships is key in helping learners open up on any challenges that they may have, even if it is not related to the learning environment. Besides, teachers can intervene by setting a curriculum that focuses on helping students with social needs. This way, students can be taught what to do in case they experience things that may make them contemplate self-harm; this could also mean establishing role-play and reaching out to parents (Cipriano et al., 2017).
Follow-up Mechanism
Keeping close interacting with parents of such students
Setting a monitoring plan for students with social needs.
Listening to students’ needs
Recommending them for social work services (Olfson et al., 2017).
First, an effective follow-up mechanism would entail ensuring parents are aware of the problem that their children in undergoing. This way, guardians can help in monitoring the students from home and teachers from school. Secondly, a monitoring plan would mean setting dates for counseling students who have a high tendency towards self-harm. Also, listening to learners would mean educators are empathetic of what such students are going through. Finally, creating recommendations for students to seek further help from social workers is an effective way of keeping track of how students improve their self-harm tendencies (Olfson et al., 2017).
Conclusion
Social problems have necessitated young people to consider self-harm as a way of solving such issues.
Educators are very instrumental in solving such problems.
But to do that, they have to understand;
-The indicators of self-harm for students at different levels of learning.
-Understand how to solve such problems.
-Know to make an effective follow-up after recommending for different interventions.
References
Sivertsen, B., Hysing, M., Knapstad, M., Harvey, A. G., Reneflot, A., Lønning, K. J., & O’Connor, R. C. (2019). Suicide attempts and non-suicidal self-harm among university students: prevalence study. BJPsych open, 5(2).
Patchin, J. W., & Hinduja, S. (2017). Digital self-harm among adolescents. Journal of Adolescent Health, 61(6), 761-766.
Cipriano, A., Cella, S., & Cotrufo, P. (2017). Nonsuicidal self-injury: a systematic review. Frontiers in psychology, 8, 1946.
Olfson, M., Wall, M., Wang, S., Crystal, S., Gerhard, T., & Blanco, C. (2017). Suicide following deliberate self-harm. American Journal of Psychiatry, 174(8), 765-774.