Living with a Thousand Cuts: Self‐Cutting, Agency, and Mental Illness among Adolescents

Abstract

Abstract The phenomenon of self‐cutting has attracted increasing attention in scholarly and popular venues. Most of the literature is written from clinical, historical, or psychometric standpoints, and what has been missing is an ethnographic understanding of self‐cutting as a lived experience. The present discussion begins to fill this gap drawing on data from our project on adolescent psychiatric inpatients in the American Southwest, during which we followed these youths and their families for between one and two years as they moved from the hospital back to their homes or to other treatment facilities. Of the 47 young people (22 females and 25 males) who participated in this project, 27 or 57% had cut themselves at some point. Focusing on illustrations from case studies that highlight their cutting experience, we examine self‐cutting as the cultural and experiential locus of a crisis of agency in the relation between body and world and thus as the enactment of a fundamental human process in the context of individual experience.

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