my answer is very much the same as sunshine's...I had never EVER heard of SI before, and not even until a few years after I started. As a 6yr old I used to pull the skin off my lips til they bled, perhaps from anxiety??? And when I was 14 I started ODing on painkillers (not to a huge degree) just to numb thing out. I 1st cut when I went on a 2mth overseas exchange. I was horribly homesick for 6 of the 8 weeks there, but it was in the final week that I 'happened' upon SI purely by accident- I tried to write something on my hand and my ink pen ran out of ink. It made a very red mark, which was oddly soothing, and then I found a tool that made it worse but made me feel better. I was totally ashamed and hid my hand (a very hard thing to do ) until the scars faded a little. Then, just over a year later when I moved out of home and into a halls of residence I was horrendously homesick again and found myself SIing on a regular basis. It wasn't until I needed to seek medical treatment that I 1st heard the phrase "self harm", and even then nothing was really done about it until after I was admitted to hospital 3x for ODs and SI. It is still a very much 'unknown' subject here, and ppl never talk about it. But as lyn said earlier too, every time I hear about SI it triggers serious urges that I usually cannot control, although it is getting better.