Self-Injury (which occurs when someone cuts or burns or otherwise harms themselves) is one of the harder behaviors associated with mental illness for people to fathom. People mostly understand (I think) when someone becomes psychotic, gets stuck in a deep depression or has mood swings. These are exaggerations of normal states of mind – everyone has felt blue at sometime or another – everyone has felt euphoric or energized at least once. And though loose, psychotic-style thinking is not something that everyone has experienced directly, at least the idea that people can experience hallucinations and delusions is familiar to most. This basic understanding is not often there when people are confronted with someone who is cutting or burning or otherwise traumatizing themselves. People don't have good reference points to use so as to understand what motivates self-injury or what people who self-injure are trying to accomplish. That acts of self-injury are so often bloody and horrifying makes it harder for people to be thoughtful about what these acts mean. There is a tendency to panic when you see someone you care about bleeding from self-inflicted wounds, or covered with scars. Such panic interferes with thinking, and makes it harder for people to understand the motives behind self-injury. Further complicating the matter is the way that self-injury looks like it must be a suicide attempt even though it usually isn't. An act of self-injury which might make sense if understood as a suicide attempt become all the more difficult to comprehend when the self-injurious person denies that they are trying to kill themselves and is telling the truth. So why do people self-injure? What are they trying to accomplish when they harm themselves? The following list of six motivations seems to cover most of the common scenarios that people who self-injure describe.

People