Topic summary
Self-mutilation
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Self-harm.
Classification
Favazza and Rosenthal reviewed hundreds of studies and divided self-mutilation into two categories: culturally sanctioned self-mutilation and deviant self-mutilation. Favazza also created two subcategories of sanctioned self-mutilations; rituals and practices. The rituals are mutilations repeated generationally and reflect a society's traditions, symbolism and beliefs. Practices "imply activities that may be faddish and that often hold little underlying significance" such as piercing of earlobes, nose, eyebrows as well as male circumcision while deviant self-mutilation is equivalent to self-harm.