Nihilism gone wrong? Sheesh. I think someone did not just lose their moral compass but had gotten one in a box of Cracker-Jacks and tossed it away as a crummy prize.

Just when you think youve heard of everything along comes yet more left wing nut insanity.

Whats next nurses monitoring people huffing spray paint or gasoline?

Whatever happened to the oath? "Do no harm . . ."

Or have they decided that "mental trauma" from not being able to indulge in a self-destructive habit outweighs the physical damage these people would inflict on themselves?

Try browsing through online journals written by young (18-24yo) women and finding more than a handful who aren't self-described "cutters".

It always struck me as a particularly sick bid-for-attention behavior in these cases, particularly loathsome for the matter-of-fact nature with which they discuss it...as though it were simply another anxiety-management tool, like counting ten or breathing exercises. Oh, but don't dare suggest that their self-admitted (if not self-promoted) cutting behavior is somehow an aberration for which they ought to seek help, lest you suffer the Wrath of the Insufficiently Worshipped Victim, in the form of a shrill journal entry bemoaning your lack of sensitivity to all the big and small traumas of their dysfunctional childhood (itemized in great detail, with adramatis personae, year-by-year timeline, index and concordance).

Which is not to say that some rare individuals aren't afflicted with a true pathology causing such behavior. There just seems to be an air of victim-cult trendiness to the first-person accounts I have come across.

Prince, you might be right in some respects re the "cultishness" of self-mutilation. Though it is true (more often than you might think) that self-destructive behavior such as self-cutting is a very real psychopathology. I know people with tendancies toward this and it is but one of several ways one can harm onesself -- overeating is another, even more common mode, leading to disasterous health problems, not least of which is type II diabetes. Alcoholism is another.

That said: this "let's help them cut" bidness? There is no excuse for this loony crap coming out of the "sensitive" medical community. Such patients should be put on watch, given extra coping sessions with their therapists, or forced to take their meds.

Putting it on the same par with handing out clean needles to prevent HIV only underscores the psychopathology of these "health professionals" (if you dare use the term).

OK, I confess - I misunderstood this one at first. I thought the comment "show them where to cut" meant they would be showing the most EFFECTIVE route to suicide, so the patients wouldn't have to suffer. Instead, I see these barkers are trying to keep the patients safe. "better to sit with the patient and talk to them while they are self-harming" - What possible words of wisdom do you have to offer? "Yes, that's a nice cut, there. That one's bleeding much better than the last try."

Bark! Bark! Bark! Flap! Flap! Flap!

Every time I think it's gotten as bizarre as it can get, they surprise me again. Stake these dudes, Van Helsing, before they rise again.

VH, over at my place, DL has explored this safe self-harm phenom a bit more and came up with a rather impressive list of other ways that the loony libs can (and in some cases do) enable this madness. He'd actually locked and loaded this post sometime yesterday I think, I'd been unable to post until now.