The voice of experience: people with learning disabilities and their families talking about how they understand self-injury

As we have already seen in Chapter 2, there is a lack of consensus amongst professionals about how we use the terms ‘self-injury’, ‘self-injurious behaviour/SIB’ and ‘self-harm’, and how people with learning disabilities fit within this. There is also, as we have seen in Chapters 4 and 5, a range of views about the theoretical underpinnings of self-injury: why people harm themselves in such a way, and what the motivating factors might be.

In this chapter, we prioritise the views of people with learning disabilities themselves as well as, at times, their family members, in order to consider what they understand about self-injury and why people with learning disabilities might self-injure.