Official websites use. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. Correspondence: Dr. Nagaraja Rao, Department of Psychiatry, J.
Medical College, Davangere - , Karnataka, India. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
A case series of self-injurious behavior SIB encountered in a General Hospital setting has been described. Limitations of current definition of SIB are explained. SIB is not a single clinical entity and it occurs in various psychiatric syndromes with wide range of psychopathology. Based on clinical criteria, a classification of SIB into three groups has been proposed viz 1 Mild and isolated form, 2 Moderately severe and repetitive form, and 3 Very severe and isolated form.
Psychodynamic, cognitive and neurochemical explanations of SIB have been reviewed. Frustration, aggression and impulsivity appearing in helpless situation appear to be a common script across most of these models of explanations. Severity of injury seems to be determined by severity of psychopathology. Site of injury appear to have symbolic significance for a particular patient. Understanding some of these clinicopsychopathological issues helps in management of these cases.
Cases of self-injurious behavior SIB are common in routine clinical practice. Acts that are associated with sexual arousal and acts committed with conscious suicidal intent are excluded. Pattison and Kahan[ 4 ] have proposed the term DSH syndrome for cases of SIB having low lethality non-suicidal usually beginning in adolescence persisting for decades resulting in personal and social morbidity. Feldman[ 3 ] distinguishes self-mutilation from SIB; according to him, self-mutilation is intentionally damaging a part of own body apparently without a conscious intent to die, and SIB is an array of behaviors ranging from self-biting and hitting to pica occurring in psychiatric conditions.
