Self-Injury awareness day

Back in 2007 I've found a group of people at Orkut, the social networking most used by Brazilian, that shared their experiences with self-injury.

This was the first time I even knew about it. I've translated some material from sites written in English because there's nothing in Portuguese on this issue. One site was from a girl who had stop and she has very insightful ideas.
It was not of great help because I guess they thought I was someone from "outside" and I got very frustrated being unable to talk to them. I only was able to talk to one boy but he was highly manipulative.

They shared their experiences showing photographs of their injuries that sometimes was quite sad to me.
I've just visited BPD in OKD and Clinically Clueless and both joined the campaign.
Clicking on these links to their sites will give you lots of explanation. This is a paragraph I took from Clinically Clueless that answers the firsts questions:

Self-injury is an addiction. According to FirstSIGNS, self-injury is defined as...

“Self-injury is any deliberate, non suicidal behaviour that inflicts physical harm on your body and is aimed at relieving emotional distress. Physical pain is often easier to deal with than emotional pain, because it causes 'real' feelings. Injuries can prove to an individual that their emotional pain is real and valid. Self-injurious behaviour may calm or awaken a person. Yet self-injury only provides temporary relief, it does not deal with the underlying issues. Self-injury can become a natural response to the stresses of day to day life and can escalate in frequency and severity.”

If you know someone who self-injure inform yourself.