Recent Research on Working with Adolescents Engaging in Self-harm

This is a half-day virtual event held on Zoom for professionals working with adolescents engaging in self-harm to hear recent research.

Self-harm is a common and distressing difficulty for many adolescents and their families. This is a half-day virtual event held on Zoom for professionals working with adolescents engaging in self-harm. This will allow for the sharing of up-to-date research and practices for professionals through presentations by researchers and clinicians with specific interests in the area of self-harm.

This event has been approved for 3 External / Internal continuous professional development (CPD)Credits by the College of Psychiatrists Ireland.

This event has Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (IACP) CPD recognition and has secured 3 IACP CPD points.

Talk 1: Self-harm and suicide prevention in young people: The role of primary care

Dr Maria Michail is an Associate Professor in the Institute for Mental Health, School of Psychology, University of Birmingham. Dr Michail leads an established research programme on youth suicide prevention. She has significant experience working in primary care settings and collaborates closely with the Royal College of General Practitioners to develop and evaluate educational resources to support GPs in the assessment and management of suicidality in primary care. Prior to taking up the post in the University of Birmingham, Maria was a Senior Research Fellow in the School of Health Sciences, University of Nottingham. Her research interests are suicide prevention in primary care settings, understanding self-harm in young people with multiple vulnerabilities, interventions to reduce suicide risk among across different settings, and the role of technology in suicide prevention. Maria is a member of the International Association for Youth Mental Health Research Network and the International Association for Suicide Prevention (IASP).

Talk 2: Self-harm in children and its implications

Dr Galit Geulayov is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford. She works as part of the Multicentre Study of Self-harm in England which aims to conduct a series of related studies on the epidemiology, causes, clinical management, outcome and prevention of self-harm. Through a multicentre collaboration the research provides representative and reliable data on self-harm in England. It contributes to the National Suicide Prevention Strategy for England (2002, 2012) and prevention and service initiative, including NICE guidance on self-harm (National Collaborating Centre for Mental Health 2004, 2011. Dr Geulayov is a researcher with over 35 research outputs.

Professor Keith Hawton is Professor of Psychiatry and Director of the Centre for Suicide Research at Oxford University; Consultant Psychiatrist with Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust, UK. His research group has been conducting investigations concerning the causes, treatment, prevention and outcome of suicidal behaviour for over 40 years. In recent years his group has taken a particular interest in investigating self-harm in children and adolescents. He has received several international awards and in the 2020 Queen’s Birthday Honours List he was made a Commander of the British Empire for Services to Suicide Prevention.

Very little is known about self-harm in children. This presentation will be of findings from a study on hospital-presenting self-harm in under-13 year-olds from the Multicentre Study of Self-harm in England. It shows that the gender distribution is different from that found for self-harm in adolescents, with a male preponderance in 5-10 year-olds and similar proportions of boys and girls in 11-year-olds. Self-harm was strongly associated with socio-economic deprivation. While, as in older individuals, self-poisoning was the main method of self-harm, particularly dangerous methods were relatively common, especially in boys. The most common problems that the children were facing at the time of self-harm were with families and peers. The presentation will include consideration of clinical and policy implications.

Reference: Geulayov, G, Casey, D, Bale, E, Brand, F, Townsend, E, Ness, J, Rehman, M, Waters, K, Clements, C, Farooq, B, Kapur, N, Hawton, K (2021), S elf-harm in children 12 years and younger: characteristics and outcomes based on the Multicentre Study of Self-harm in England . Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology: DOI: 10.1007/s00127-021-02133-6 (Open access)

Talk 3: The fertile ground in which it grows: understanding the role of stigma, discrimination and harassment as contributors to suicidal distress amongst LGBT+ young people and how to intervene in it.

Dr Hazel Marzetti (she/her) is currently a Research Associate on the Suicide in/as Politics project funded by the Leverhulme Trust. The project uses an interdisciplinary approach, situated between sociology and political studies, to investigate how suicide is constructed and represented in political discourses and policy documents. This project uses a range of qualitative methods of enquiry including arts-based, creative approaches and critical policy analysis. Prior to this current post-doctoral position, Hazel undertook her doctoral studies at the University of Glasgow's MRC/CSO Social and Public Health Sciences Unit. Her doctoral studies used qualitative research interviews to seek better understandings of young lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans (LGBT+) people's suicidal thoughts and attempts in Scotland. Hazel's research interests centre on critical suicide studies, LGBT+ mental health, the role of emotions in research practices, and qualitative approaches to health research.