I am usually good with the cut-tag, so I hope you'll excuse the one long-ass post here. I feel it's important.

This Monday, March 1st, is Self-Injury Awareness Day. Self-injury is an important issue that doesn't get nearly the attention it deserves. The problem affects roughly 1% of the population, so there's a good chance that someone you know is suffering from it. Perhaps someone close to you.

Please, take a few minutes and read fox1013's informative and moving post about it: here.

From personal experience, I can tell you that self-injury is difficult to grapple with when it affects someone close to you. This is partly because of the taboo nature of the problem and the resulting secrecy surrounding it.

Several years ago, I glanced at my brother's bare arm (he usually kept them covered with long sleeves) and was shocked to discover dozens and dozens of self-inflicted cigarette burns, in a carefully constructed pattern.

I knew something was really wrong. But. I. Did. Nothing. Didn't say a word. Didn't do a thing. I just...didn't even know how to begin to deal. I am still ashamed and embarrassed by my inaction, even though he has since gotten help. I believe that if I been more aware of why and what he was doing, it might have helped me to help him.

An "awareness day" is great and all, but it only works if people actually use the occasion to promote awareness. So please do. Talk about it and spread the word.

To help, I put together a banner linking to an excellent site that offers information and support for self-injury. Please feel free to use it, if you are so moved.

Here's a code to copy the banner into your journal:

<center><a href=http://www.palace.net/~llama/psych/injury.html target="_blank"><img src=http://pics.livejournal.com/autumnyte/pic/0002zw42 border=0></a><br><small>Click on the ribbon for more information. <br>To put this in your own journal, go <a href="http://www.livejournal.com/users/autumnyte/121839.html">here.</a></small></center>

Here's the actual banner:

Click on the ribbon for more information.
To put this in your own journal, go here.


Thus ends my PSI. Those who made it through, thank you for reading it. *Hugs Flist*


ETA: If the link to your ribbon appears as a broken image, that is because my old image hosting site went down. Apologies for the inconvenience. If you would still like to use the banner, just copy the code above, which has now been modified to link to a working image. (And LJ Scrapbook is the new image host, so hopefully from now on, whenever LJ is up, the banner will be up.,)