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How common is severe self harm?

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TheSperg
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26 May 2015, 12:44 am

http://www.reddit.com/r/autism/comments ... f_painful/

This thread on reddit has some shocking claims by posters who claim to have worked with autistic people, such as:

Quote:
I have worked with people who have pulled out their own teeth, detached retinas through headbanging, broken noses, and literally scratched their own eye tissue away to nothing. I can't imagine how shocking them with painful bursts of electricity would benefit them at all. It's awful to see a person do this to their own body, yes, but aversive therapy like this is just torture.


8O

Other posters claim similar things.



cavernio
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26 May 2015, 9:11 am

I would think that sort of self-harm would have to occur as a result of dealing with extreme pain :-(
I could see myself getting there, but 'there' is still far away, even when I do mild self-harm.


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eggheadjr
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26 May 2015, 2:34 pm

I would tend to think that severe self-harm is relatively rare.

I still bang my head from time to time but not hard enough to hurt myself. Just a light tapping.


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btbnnyr
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26 May 2015, 2:42 pm

It is rare, I know of one person who does severe self-harm, they are severely autistic + intellectually disabled, no way to communicate at all what is physically+mentally bothering them and causing uncontrollable self-harm behaviors.


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EzraS
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27 May 2015, 10:32 am

I've been in schools with mostly autistic kids my whole life and never saw that kind of self mutilation going on. Some more severely autistic wear bicycle helmets to protect from head banging, but that's about it. I self harmed when I was 13 by cutting/scratching myself. But NT teens do that too. I got CBT to help fix that, which it did. I still hit and bite myself sometimes, but nothing severe.