To Drug or Not To Drug

Lately I’ve been playing with a question I was asked after a workshop I presented on SIV. A psychologist stopped to talk after the training and was arguing the need to have the right to restrain people who self-injure.

I gave him my thoughts about how retraumatizing people who already are living in a world of pain serves no one, including the staff of the institutions in which restraint and seclusion (tying people down to beds and/or locking them in padded rooms) remain prevalent He remained adamant that all SIV must be stopped, that clinicians should not have to tolerate anyone who continues to self-injure. He proposed using psychiatric drugs to achieve this as well, but did admit that there are no drugs, used appropriately, that achieve the result he was after.

It was his next statement that I found interesting. He was adamant that if a psychiatric drug could be created to take away the need to self-injure, that all the people living with SIV would be more than interested in taking it forever. I told him that I didn’t think this to be true, but that I would ask the experts, the people who live with SIV. I believe that SIV is not “all bad” as this psychologist was presenting, that SIV serves a purpose in many people’s lives that helps them cope with the aftereffects of trauma and the struggles of healing.

While living with SIV certainly has its down side, it also has a purpose. And as people come to understand the trauma in their histories the need for SIV abates as healing progresses. A drug that would solve the problem so simply would likely do what so many of the other drugs used previously have done, make a person so numb that they might lose touch with their pain and struggle but also become so numbed as to not feel truly alive. I presumed that the price of permanently drugging oneself out of the need for SIV would be too high to pay. I believe that SIV fades away as we learn to understand, experience, and release the pain, rage and disconnection that it manages. We can learn a great deal about ourselves from the urges to self-injure.

But he made me think and now I am curious. Any thoughts out there?

Ruta Mazelis, Editor of The Cutting Edge