The lived experience of self-injury stigma and its psychosocial impact: a thematic analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) represents a prevalent and significant mental health difficulty experienced by young adults. Few efforts have explored lived experience perspectives concerning the impact of NSSI stigma, despite long-standing recognition that NSSI is highly stigmatised and recent calls for more research in this area. New insights would be fruitful in identifying which manifestations of stigma are most germane to people who engage in NSSI and what stigma-related supports they may need. Accordingly, the present study sought to understand lived experience perspectives regarding the impact of NSSI stigma. METHOD: A total of 97 young adults with a mean age of 19.32 years (standard deviation [SD] = 2.17) participated in the present study. Participants completed an online survey, including open-ended questions asking about how they have been impacted by NSSI stigma and how they believe people are generally impacted by such stigma. Reflexive thematic analysis was used to analyse text-based responses. RESULTS: Our analysis yielded four themes, namely: Shamed into Silence; Unspoken but Sensed Stigma; Anticipation and Avoidance of Stigma, Enduring Shadow of Stigma. These implicate internal forms of stigma - namely, self and anticipated stigma. Collectively, such stigma fomented a significant and often ongoing psychosocial burden involving shame and disclosure reluctance. Participants also perceived external stigma from others, highlighting both verbal and non-verbal considerations therein. CONCLUSION: The current findings highlight several psychosocial consequences of NSSI stigma for individuals with lived experience. In this way, this study adds to a growing body of work illustrating the value of lived experience perspectives in NSSI research and has important implications for research, anti-stigma work, and clinical practice.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.014 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".