It is the dog-days of summer. My creative energies have focused more on photography and collage work instead of writing. To give the IC Blog some attention while savouring the remaining days of summer (and working), I have decided to dust off a paper I wrote in the fall of 2009 and present it here in a series of posts.

The paper came about from an assignment for a course I was in where students in the class had to write an article (within a tight word limit) for a fictional journal. (I was taking the course to do some continuing education.) We submitted our respective articles, got feedback from reviewers (real people!), and revised the article to address feedback received. The article needed to address an issue pertaining to psychodiagnostics that entailed some degree of controversy.

I opted to write on diagnostic issues in self-injury–something that up to that point, I hadn’t delved into in much depth. Because I wrote it for a graduate course in a clinical psychology program, it is written formally and is academic in tone. For those thinking of hiring me for a workshop, don’t worry! I don’t talk quite this way! But I hope that the article will serve here as a freely accessible resource providing an overview and summary of some facets of self-injury, as well as fuel for the continued thinking and research on diagnostic issues as they pertain to the subject.

In the next post, I’ll provide the paper’s abstract and go from there. In the final post, I will include a reference list for the citations included throughout.

Series Table of Contents
1. Introducing the series… (you are here).
2. Abstract
3. Introduction, Classification, and Prevalence of NSSI
4. Functions, Etiology, and Psychological Factors in NSSI
5. Should self-injury be classified as a mental disorder?
6. Is self-injury an impulse disorder?
7. Alternative Considerations and Conclusion
8. References

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Next post: Abstract