Nonsuicidal self injury

I’ve written before about NSSI as it relates to depression, PTSD, and dissociation. Today, I present two more studies. Hepp, Carpenter, Freeman, Vebares & Trull (2020) published “The Environmental, Interpersonal, and Affective Context of Nonsuicidal Self-Injury Urges in Daily Life” in Personality Disorders: Theory, Research, and Treatment.  Here’s the edited abstract:

Urges for nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI) are important precursors to NSSI acts and may serve as a point of intervention. A close understanding of the phenomenology of NSSI urges and the contexts in which they occur is therefore warranted. We used ambulatory assessment to examine the environmental, interpersonal, and affective contexts of NSSI urges. We recruited 56 participants with borderline personality disorder who reported on urges and contexts for 21 days with six random daily prompts, resulting in 5,750 completed assessments. Twenty-two participants reported 160 NSSI urges. We provide extensive descriptive results characterizing the interaction partners, activities, and events participants reported in association with NSSI urges. Results from a logistic multilevel model using the full sample (testing associations between all contexts and urges simultaneously) revealed that urges were more likely to occur at higher levels of negative affect, when rejection was experienced, and later in the day. Urges were not associated with disagreements or feeling let down, being at home versus away, being alone versus in company, socializing versus doing another activity, and it being a weekday versus weekend. Additional growth curve analysis for negative affect using the subsample of 22 participants who reported urges showed that, over the course of urge days compared with nonurge days, negative affect increased before urges, peaked during the urge, and then decreased, approximating a quadratic curve. We conclude that urges occurred primarily in the context of negative affect and rejection, which is consistent with theories on intra- and interpersonal functions of NSSI. 

Hepp is a co-author on one of the previous blogs I offered on NSSI. I thought this study of people with Borderline Personality Disorder was interesting in focusing on urges to self-harm. Their conclusion is interesting as are the factors that urges were not consistently associated with. Next, Somma, Gialdi, Krueger, Markon & Fossati (2024) published “Predicting Nonsuicidal Self-Injury and Suicidal Risk: A comparison between the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition Section II personality disorder and alternative model of personality disorders dimensions” in Personality Disorders: Theory, Research, and Treatment.  Here’s the edited abstract:

The clinical relevance of nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI) has received growing recognition, and NSSI represents a relevant risk factor for suicide. The present study aimed at running a head-to-head comparison between interview scores of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5) Section II personality disorders (PDs) criteria, and DSM-5 Alternative Model of Personality Disorder (AMPD) Criterion A and Criterion B measures in providing significant and relevant information for understanding NSSI and suicidal ideation and behavior among psychotherapy participants. To this aim, a clinical sample of 103 adult participants was administered the Clinician-Administered Nonsuicidal Self-Injury Disorder Index (CANDI), the Columbia Suicide Severity Rating Scale (C-SSRS), as well as the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-5 Personality Disorders, the Structured Clinical Interview for the DSM-5 Alternative Model for Personality Disorders Module I, and a self-report measure of dysfunctional personality traits (i.e., the Personality Inventory for DSM-5 [PID-5]). Logistic ordinal regression dominance analysis results showed that, when compared to the 10 DSM-5 Section II PD symptom counts, the DSM-5 Section III PD measure scores provided the same amount of information in the CANDI Global Severity Index scores (Nagelkerke pseudo-R² value = .41), and a markedly larger information quantity in the case of the C-SSRS Suicidal Ideation (+35.1%), and Suicidal Behavior Index (+35.9%) levels. As a whole, our data suggested the clinical usefulness of the DSM-5 AMPD in understanding NSSI and suicidal ideation and behavior. 

In this case, the focus is on therapy clients and the utility of the AMPD, which I’ve also written about previously. Here, we see again findings supporting the AMPD as clinically useful.