SH-Reduction is a resource for people who cut themselves to learn ways to reduce the harm cutting causes. There’s not enough people taking an approach to self harm that’s actually effective. This website exists to help change that.
Mental health professionals don’t really give people who self-harm any help other than trying to get you to stop immediately. Which I don’t necessarily disagree with; the goal is to get people to stop as soon as possible. But they have many blind spots and a seemingly fundamental misunderstanding of self-harm, which causes their interventions to be notoriously unhelpful.
Let’s talk about the blind spots first. I don’t know if they’re genuinely oblivious to this or if it’s simply ignored, but people who cut generally don’t want to stop. I felt like this when I was cutting and people I talk to who are actively cutting tell me this as well. When you’re so used to self-harm, you wholeheartedly believe that it doesn’t negatively effect you. You like cutting, you want more scars, you want to cut deeper.
There's also a general animosity for mental health professionals among people who’ve been in the system for a long time. If you’ve become dependent on cutting, you’ve probably had bad or traumatizing experiences with them. Self-harm isn’t something you hide because you fear judgment, you hide it because you don’t want to be put in the psych ward. If you live with your parents, you don’t want to have everything sharp in the house locked in the safe (yes, this is from personal experience.) You don’t want to have your door taken off your bedroom. You don’t want to be interrogated about where and why and this and that. You don’t like them and you have a hundred reasons not to tell them about your cutting.
There’s also the internet, which is a massive part of the equation. It’s pretty common knowledge that there's a side of the internet that glamorizes eating disorders and communities that “help” other people starve themselves to death, but the self-harm side of the internet is quite unknown. Which is surprising, because the pro-ed and self-harm communities are deeply intertwined. Twitter/”X” is the primary breeding ground for these types of groups, “edtwt” and “shtwt” respectively, but “shedtwt” is very common as well; the combination of the two terms. There’s really no internet-wide term for these spaces that isn’t outdated. I’ll be using the term “pro-ed,” but keep in mind it’s generally not what these communities will use to identify themselves.
I won't deny there's probably some people who started cutting or developed an eating disorder sometime after the mid-2000s who’ve never interacted with these spaces, but they’re few and far between. The size and effect of these communities cannot be understated. I strongly believe most people start cutting because of the online glamorization of it. And because eating disorders and self-harm go hand-in-hand on the internet, people who were only suffering with one can easily slip into the other.
If you’ve never been in it, it’s very hard to understand. The way it's framed in most coverage of the issue is genuinely astounding for how uninformed it is. For one, the way “proana” is usually used when talking about these communities leads me to believe research hasn’t been done on it in a while, because they’ve pretty much dropped the label. Predators, which used to be a hallmark of the pro-ed spaces, aren’t nearly as rampant as they used to be. It’s not uncommon for people to make “callout” posts on accounts in shedtwt who are also liking and sharing porn, and there’s a general understanding throughout the community that your partner shouldn’t be involved with or encouraging your eating disorder. “Coaches” in the pro-ed circles have also been obsolete for years. There's even this phenomenon of people insisting they’re “not pro,” “only pro for myself” or “pro recovery.”
In terms of what's actually in these spaces, it’s mainly tips and inspiration to get worse. Thinspo is still going strong, but cutspo, which is images and videos of fresh self-harm, is extremely common as well. When you self-harm and spend time in these spaces you start to feel like unless you aren’t cutting through veins, deep enough to see your muscle or hypodermis, covered in red scars, etc. you aren’t “bad enough.” The want for more scars is taken to an entirely new level online. There’s this unspoken rule that you have to become “the worst.” It’s very common to see people asking how to cut deeper, upset that their cuts are “too shallow” or sharing pictures of how much they bled or how deep they went. It’s incredibly toxic, and because Twitter has absolutely abysmal moderation, it’s been allowed to fester.
I could go on, but my point is that it’s a big contributor to why people cut and it’s not taken into account by mental health professionals when helping people who self-harm.
So, what will work? How do you help someone who doesn’t want to be helped and is in an echochamber of people who are encouraging them?
Let me say this. You can take people’s blades away, you can tell them the psychological reasons why they keep going back to it, you can give them corny preventative methods like holding ice and ripping paper, you can warn them of scars and bleeding and infections, you can tell them it must hurt those closest to them, but you can't force upon someone the will to stop doing something self-destructive. You can’t instill the desire to stop cutting through words alone. They’ll inevitably go back to cutting when you can’t convince them to stop.
And there's no 100% infallible method that can do that. It will never be a smooth, streamline process. It’s fucking hard. But we can’t just settle with what we’ve been given. I won’t. We need to stop fighting against people who self-harm and start meeting them where they’re at.
That’s where harm reduction comes in.
You know about NSPs- needle & syringe programs? The places that offer free sterile needles for people with drug addictions? It’s the same concept. Fully stopping is an incredibly hard feat, but we can still lessen the harm this does. That’s why this website exists.
- Keegan (Keegballz)
- Kyra (KyraCrystal)