Psychological Self-harm

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I have tried googling "psychological self-harm". There seems to be no such thing as "psychological self-harm".
The only self-harm there exists, is the one where you cut into your tissue.

While I am not doing that, occassionally I just hit myself (to inflict physical pain), the "self-harm" I am inflicting upon myself is psychological of nature:

I deliberately search and watch videos on YouTube where people are being executed, both real footage and made-up scenes from movies.

I am not pro-death penalty. In-fact, I HATE the Death Penalty and it scares the s**t out of me.
It has no relevance for me. I've never murdered anyone, and I the country I live in doesn't have the death penalty.

That's also why I am watching it... to be scared, to the point of anxiety, to be so anxious that I can do nothing but lay in my bed, being temporarily traumatized
from watching someone who knew when and where to they were going to be murdered by authorities.

It's claimed that autists cannot have empathy... I've been told they can, and I am also a living example of that. Or I wouldn't suffer when I watch an execution.

I watch these executions to inflict psychological damage on myself.

I'd like to know why I do it, because... frankly, it's not pleasant.

Why do I do something to myself to deliberatly make me anxious?

It's usually when I am feeling a good mood, that I need to stop my good mood, and watch an execution or two, in order to get traumatized to the point of feeling suicidal.

Why? I really need answers...

That doesn't fit the clinical definition of 'self harm' which, as you note, is typically considered to mean physical harm.

It does, however fit the definition of an obsessive-compulsive behavior and OCD type issues are not uncommon in High Functioning Autism.

I'm surprised those videos don't give you nightmares. That's usually enough to make people stay away from them.

I've seen some movies that really push the envelope in terms of decency (Flowers of Flesh & Blood, Irreversible, Audition, Men Behind the Sun, Laboratory of the Devil, Slaughtered Vomit Dolls, etc) and I myself wonder if I'm inflicting psychological harm on myself.

I used to do something like this. Slightly like this. Maybe it helps.

I came across certain videos on the internet, horrible videos. Once I had seen them, I couldn't unsee them. The fact that people were doing these things traumatized me; I had difficulty forgetting about it. Unconsciously, I decided that the only way I could psychologically deal with having the images in my mind, and knowing that I lived in a world with people who did these things, was to watch more of it to de-sensitize myself.

I also used to fear having a serious emotional breakdown, or experiencing a strong and long-lasting emotion such as grief. When I found myself very happy, I would sometimes stop to get a hold of my emotions, perhaps visualize something bad happening to keep myself from getting too high emotionally. I thought that being too happy, and getting used to that state, would cause me to fall harder if something tragic ever happened. I would imagine my family members dying so that I could in some sense emotionally prepare myself for tragedy.

For many years of my life, I found myself watching sadistic horror movies for pretty much the same reasons. I found myself somewhat relating to people in those films who were stripped of all their defenses and left to their cruel fates knowing that they had no way out of it. When I was in middle school, receiving death threats on a regular basis, and having the staff laugh at me when I told them how much that scared me, I felt extremely helpless. When I was being abused by the narcissistic adults in my family, and when my parents told me never to talk about it because it broke their hearts (yeah, they really were that selfish), I felt helpless. That became the comfortable norm for me. I was watching all of that to keep myself in that comfortable helpless state.

Today, I'd rather watch a Richard Curtis movie.

I no longer have to reinforce the negative attitudes of the people who were supposed to nurture and protect me when I was younger. So I pretty much lost all interest in watching gratuitous emotional and physical suffering when I decide to watch a movie on Netflix. I am regaining my sensitivity and my empathy. If I can climb out of it, anyone can.

^ Is that why I am enthralled by medieval torture devices and the book Martyrs Mirror? I'm reinforcing the negative attitudes of those who were supposed to nurture me? I guess that's still waiting to be resolved because I still research torture devices from time to time as well as peruse the violent images and tales of Martyrs Mirror.

I can only speak for myself.

It seems like you want to control your emotions. You know how you're going to react to the videos and that's predictable, you control what emotion you're going to have. Sometimes the feeling of being in control beats the feeling of being happy.