The literature on self-injurious behavior suggests five major hypotheses concerning the motivation of such behavior: (a) self-injurious behavior is a learned operant, maintained by positive social reinforcement (positive reinforcement hypothesis); (b) self-injurious behavior is a learned operant, maintained by the termination of an aversive stimulus (negative reinforcement hypothesis) ; (c) sel...

BACKGROUND Admitted patients who fall and injure themselves during an acute hospitalization incur increased costs, morbidity, and mortality, but little research has been conducted on identifying inpatients at high risk to injure themselves in a fall. Falls risk assessment tools have been unsuccessful due to their low positive predictive value when applied broadly to entire hospital populations....

Self-injurious behavior is commonly observed among persons with intellectual disabilities. However, a second parallel use of this term is used in the general mental health field for self-mutilation. The authors describe these two disorders and how they differ. Characteristics of what we refer to as repetitive self-injurious behavior among persons with intellectual disabilities and risk factors ...

Self-injurious ideation or behavior appeared de novo or intensified during fluoxetine treatment of obsessive-compulsive disorder in six patients, age 10 to 17 years old, who were among 42 young patients receiving fluoxetine for obsessive-compulsive disorder at a university clinical research center. These symptoms required the hospitalization of four patients. Before receiving fluoxetine, four p...

OBJECTIVE The goal was to assess the prevalence, forms, demographic and mental health correlates of self-injurious behaviors in a representative college sample. METHODS A random sample of undergraduate and graduate students at 2 northeastern US universities were invited to participate in an Internet-based survey in the spring of 2005. Thirty-seven percent of the 8300 invited participants resp...