Abstract

In modern mental health care, ‘recovery’ does not necessarily mean the same thing for clinicians, service users, and survivor groups. This divergence is especially stark where self-injury is concerned. For clinicians, recovery often refers to cessation of self-injury; for those with lived experience, self-harm may be a temporary or long-term method of navigating trauma and distress. This article explores how the survivor-led model, which regards self-injury as an understandable reaction to distress, poverty, abuse, and discrimination emerged from second-wave feminism, the survivor movement, and the growth of grassroots mental health groups in the 1980s. We focus on Bristol Crisis Service for Women (BCSW), a peer-led listening service for women who self-injure, founded in 1986. We begin with the history of BCSW and how experiences of their founders and users caused them to advocate for a different model of self-injury. We then situate BCSW’s approach to self-harm and recovery within the frame of women’s mental health activism. Finally, we explore how BCSW and its allies criticised existing psychiatric paradigms of self-harm, showing how the individualised medical model was rooted in gendered stereotypes that failed to recognise the real-world concerns of many women. We argue that it remains important to see self-harm not as an individual health concern, but in relation to the structural and practical issues affecting users and survivors. Within BCSW, a peer-led service, experience of self-injury became not a deficit but a useful asset in supporting other women, indicating that recovery itself could be both collective and non-linear.