BACKGROUND Self-harm among young people in the UK is possibly increasing but little is known about the reasons young people give for cessation and their link with gender or employment status. AIMS To investigate self-harm in young people, prevalence, methods used, motivations for starting and ceasing, service use, and how these are related to gender, parental social class and current labour m...

Existing moral psychology research commonly explains certain phenomena in terms of a motivation to blame. However, this motivation is not measured directly, but rather is inferred from other measures, such as participants' judgments of an agent's blameworthiness. The present paper introduces new methods for assessing this theoretically important motivation, using tools drawn from animal-model r...

Pedophilia is bad. But how bad is it? And in what ways, and for what reasons, is it bad? This is a thorny issue, and sadly, one seldom discussed by ethicists. I argue in this article that pedophilia is bad only because, and only to the extent that, it causes harm to children, and that pedophilia itself, as well as pedophilic expressions and practices that do not cause harm to children, are mora...

This qualitative study explored the motivations, meanings, functions, and consequences of self-harm for young women in urban and suburban contexts. It found that all 6 participants deliberately harmed themselves in response to traumas, family stress, and relationship problems. However, the suburban girls connected their self-harm behaviors to an overall sense of despondency, whereas the urban g...

BACKGROUND Self-harm is a major public health problem yet current healthcare provision is widely regarded as inadequate. One of the barriers to effective healthcare is the lack of a clear understanding of the functions self-harm may serve for the individual. The aim of this review is to identify first-hand accounts of the reasons for self-harm from the individual's perspective. METHOD A syste...

BACKGROUND For people who self-harm, there is growing evidence to suggest that services and treatment outcomes can be adversely affected by healthcare staffs' stigmatising attitudes and behaviours. To date, the empirical literature has tended to focus on the attitudes of experienced healthcare professionals working with adults who self-harm. Additionally, there has been few theory or model-driv...

Social media use has been described as influencing selfharm and suicide behaviour in survey-based studies and elsewhere. However, there is no published epidemiological data exploring social media use and suicide. This study aimed to review deaths involving both self-harm and social media use to determine whether demographic commonalities exist which may inform future preventative public health ...

Public health communication campaigns have been credited with helping raise awareness of risk from chronic illness and new infectious diseases and with helping promote the adoption of recommended treatment regimens. Yet many aspects of public health communication interventions have escaped the scrutiny of ethical discussions. With the transference of successful commercial marketing communicatio...

In September 2012, a group known as Australia 21 called for a rethink on the prohibition against illegal drugs. If the response from Australian Federal, State, and Territory Governments is any guide, the call fell on deaf ears. In recent years, even scholarly debate about the merits of prohibition appears to have subsided. This paper acknowledges that social and financial costs of the prohibiti...