When language is maladaptive: recommendations for discussing self-injury
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to call on researchers and clinicians to carefully consider the terminology used when discussing non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI), and specifically the use of the term “maladaptive” coping. Design/methodology/approach Drawing on literature regarding stigma, language and self-injury to support the argument that the term maladaptive is inappropriate to describe self-injury. Findings Use of the term maladaptive conflates short-term effectiveness with long-term outcomes and ignores context in which the behaviour occurs. Social implications Use of the term maladaptive to describe self-injury can invalidate the person with a history of NSSI, impacting stigma and potentially help-seeking. An alternate framing focussed on specific coping strategies is offered. Originality/value Language is a powerful medium of communication that has significant influence in how society shapes ideas around mental health. In proposing a change in the way the authors’ talk about self-injury there is potential to significantly improve the wellbeing of people with lived experience of self-injury.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".