Hidden Too Long: uncovering Self-Harm in Scotland

Last year, Samaritans provided emotional support every two minutes to someone in connection with self-harm. While this gives us some insight into the scale of self-harm, our understanding of how it can impact individuals, families, and communities in which they live is far from complete.

Scotland has recently made great strides in improving mental health and wellbeing, but self-harm is not a focus of any current strategy and has received limited attention from policy makers – despite increasing numbers of people reporting they have self-harmed.

Self-harm is an issue that is often hidden and poorly understood. It is surrounded by entrenched stigma that can limit people’s willingness to seek help and access the right support.

We hope this report will help to improve our understanding of self-harm in Scotland and allow us to provide better support to people who self-harm and the parents, carers, family members and friends who support them. We also want to see us all begin to address the reasons people feel the need to self-harm at all.

In publishing this report we are not trying to provide all the answers; instead we wish to generate a national conversation about self-harm and consider how a future strategy could help to deepen understanding, reduce stigma, improve support and tackle the issues that lead to self-harm.

You can download our report Hidden Too Long: Uncovering Self-Harm in Scotland below.

We have explored experiences of self-harm and help-seeking across the UK and Republic of Ireland individual reports for each respective nation.