Citation

Kapur N, Cooper J. Br. Med. J. BMJ 2005; 330(7498): 1026.

Affiliation

Centre for Suicide Prevention, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Sciences, University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9PL, UK.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2005, BMJ Publishing Group)

DOI

10.1136/bmj.330.7498.1026

PMID

12028981

PMCID

PMC113279

Abstract

In 2002 the British Medical Journal (BMJ) published a trial of a general practice based intervention to prevent repetition of deliberate self harm. The article was illustrated by two pictures, one on the front cover of the paper version of the journal, which depicted self cutting. Readers pointed out that this was misleading because self poisoning (rather than self injury) made up the great majority of self harm episodes. Times have moved on. The terminology has changed -- the qualifier 'deliberate' has been dropped from 'self harm' in response to the heterogeneous nature of the phenomenon and the concerns of service users -- but the choice of illustrative material seems to have remained the same. The synopsis of our article on risk assessment after self harm in the BMJ was accompanied by a picture of a person about to cut himself or herself with a blade.