Wounding Wilma Stops Cutting Herself

Munchausen by Proxy was our topic last month. People who responded to my writing about this horrible problem in society were to the majority wondering "how could someone live a life involving harming their children?" This month, as if in a natural progression, my topic moves over to the area of self-harm, or as most psychiatrists refer to it, self-mutilation.

Let us start off by seeing what Webster's dictionary has to say about a couple of words:

Mutilate: To injure or disfigure by removing or irreparably damaging parts; or, to deprive a person or animal of a limb or other essential part. Cutting: The act of a person or thing that cuts with a sharp-edged instrument; or, even penetration by a cut. Cut: To lacerate or wound, to carve out, to hollow out, striking oneself with the edge of a blade; to lower, diminish, reduce, dissolve, cease, discontinue; to shut off or shut out, to remove, to delete, to distress mentally. Cut can even mean to wound the feelings of someone severely as in being sarcastic. Finally, to cut can mean, "cutting a passage or channel (like a cut through the woods.)

Looking at some of these definitions can help you understand yet another piece of what can evolve from someone being severely depressed. If you take some of the above meanings and contemplate deeply upon them, you can begin to see and then understand how cutting on oneself can bring about the ability for them to get a strange form of relief. The fact is though that it is found to be a form of relief for people that are severely depressed.

"How could she actually do that?" Wilma's mother was quick to ask the therapist when she visited with him. 'Wounding Wilma' used razor blades and had been carving on her ankles for months. Her mother finally asked her daughter why her socks were always bloody looking. Wilma could only shake her head. She could not share the secret. One day her mother walked in Wilma's bedroom and caught her scrapping her ankle with a small knife. She asked Wilma why she was doing that to herself. Wilma could only shake her head. So, Wilma's mother made an appointment with Dr. Sherman and the process of recovery began for them.

A 'cutter' is a hard person to understand if you yourself cannot imagine harming your own body. Through RoseMeade's Wellness Nook, I have divulged some private information about myself that some people would quite possibly have kept forever. My motives are duo-fold. One is to help my audience understand certain segments of depression from a patient's viewpoint. As I am not a doctor or therapist, my sharing is only from experience and it is with this experience, that I hope to be able to empathize, understand and care for others who do live a painful lifestyle. It is my hope that through my sharing that people will move more towards a healthy state and move further away from depression.

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