Cutting Through Identities: to Alter the Body or to Heal the Mind?

“But this article is not actually about cutting. If one has not yet guessed what it is really about by now, it is time for me to pull back the curtain.”

Jill has an obsession with cutting herself. Do not worry; it is not life-threatening. We are talking small cuts, just minor self-mutilation. Why does she do it? I do not know. Neither does she, really. Usually, she starts feeling a bit depressed or anxious, or sometimes just angry or tense. The feeling lingers. She starts thinking about cutting herself. She knows it is not actually a good idea, that it leaves bruises, gashes and other unsightly marks, and a few times, when she went too far, it even left small but permanent scars, but the temptation keeps bubbling to the surface and is too strong to resist. The closest she can get to explaining it is that it is like an itch she knows she should not scratch because the skin is already irritated, and yet, the itch keeps itching her, and scratching it brings instantaneous release and relief. So she does it again. It satisfies her in the moment, but this time—like every other time—the sensation does not last, and regret begins to well up within her in short order. She washes away the blood and contemplates the ugly scratches on her left forearm. Although it is the middle of summer, she will have to wear a long-sleeved shirt again so that no one can see, though her mother, of course, will guess. “This would be so much easier if they didn’t stigmatize me for it,” Jill thinks with indignation, “Then, at least, I wouldn’t have to cover it up, wouldn’t have to live with the shame, wouldn’t have to take pains to conceal who I am.” It all becomes a vicious circle. Her shame and the negative judgments and condemnatory looks and words of elders and peers drive more waves of anger and depression. These add further fuel that ignites the burning itch once again. And she cuts again, and she hides again. She seethes with hatred for herself and for the world in which she is condemned to live.

Jill’s wish for public acknowledgement and acceptance will not be fulfilled anytime soon, it seems. This is not because her behavior is all that unusual. Sources report that cutting and other similar forms of self-harm may be exhibited by 4% of adults and a whopping 15% of teens, with some studies even estimating rates as high as 17-35% among college students. In spite of the widespread nature of the issue—or perhaps because of it—the most current diagnostic manual of the American Psychiatric Association, the DSM-5, added the malady to its collection when it was published in 2013. It goes by the unimaginative but apt name of “non-suicidal self-injury.” The diagnosis requires, in summary, five or more days of minor or moderate self-harm (e.g., cutting, burning, hitting, rubbing) “for purposes not socially sanctioned (e.g., body piercing, tattooing, etc.).” In addition, the behavior cannot be “of a common and trivial nature, such as picking at a wound or nail biting.” (There are other requirements—the full DSM-5 criteria for the disorder are here—but they are less material to my purposes.)

Let us imagine, however, that Jill got her wish. Imagine that cutting went from a pathology to an identity. We can conceive of the formation of a political group with a catchy name, like “Cut Off,” that begins to mobilize along the lines of its many identitarian predecessors to point us to the manner in which the stigmatization of cutting is socially constructed. Mustering academic support among sociologists to lend credibility to the cause with the requisite citations to Foucault’s Madness and Civilization and the like, they would have us note how the DSM’s very language in this case—speaking explicitly, as it does, of self-mutilation “for purposes not socially sanctioned (e.g., body piercing, tattooing, etc.)” and excluding from the definition’s scope behaviors “of a common…nature,” such as nail-biting—is tantamount to an open acknowledgment that cutting, far from an easily classifiable pathology, is fundamentally defined through its contrast with that which is “socially sanctioned” and “common.” To put it another way, cutting, despite how widespread it actually is, is not psychologically acceptable largely because it is not socially accepted. It has been abnormalized because it is not “normal.”