![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Self-harm as protest translates badly to Western culture: the Buddhist monks who immolated themselves in protest at the Vietnam war, the refugees* who sewed their own mouths closed as part of hunger strikes in Australia's detention centres. These actions horrified and bewildered Westerners rather than engaging their compassion.
It struck me that there may be a parallel with the dismissal and mocking of self-harm when it's a symptom of mental illness - the dangerous assumption that it's immature attention-seeking. Do you remember the Japanese workers who were taken hostage in Iraq and were pillaried in Japan for embarrassing everyone by being victims? Perhaps the mocking of self-harm in Western culture is a similar rejection of "weakness".
___
*Technically, at the time, they were "asylum seekers". Since almost everyone in the centres has subsequently been found to be a genuine refugee (generally fleeing either Saddam or the Taliban), the term "refugee" is correct in retrospect.
It struck me that there may be a parallel with the dismissal and mocking of self-harm when it's a symptom of mental illness - the dangerous assumption that it's immature attention-seeking. Do you remember the Japanese workers who were taken hostage in Iraq and were pillaried in Japan for embarrassing everyone by being victims? Perhaps the mocking of self-harm in Western culture is a similar rejection of "weakness".
___
*Technically, at the time, they were "asylum seekers". Since almost everyone in the centres has subsequently been found to be a genuine refugee (generally fleeing either Saddam or the Taliban), the term "refugee" is correct in retrospect.
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}