What are some safe alternatives to self-harm. How can someone cope with emotional pain in healthier ways. What resources are available for those struggling with self-harm urges. Why is self-harm dangerous and what are the potential consequences.

Understanding Self-Harm Urges

Self-harm, including intentionally breaking bones or injuring oneself, is often a misguided attempt to cope with emotional pain or distress. While it may provide temporary relief, self-harm is extremely dangerous and can lead to severe physical consequences. It’s crucial to understand that these urges stem from underlying emotional issues that require proper treatment and support.

Why do people consider self-harm? Some common reasons include:

• Feeling overwhelmed by intense emotions
• Trying to express pain that feels inexpressible
• Punishing oneself due to low self-esteem
• Attempting to feel something when emotionally numb
• Seeking attention or a cry for help

Recognizing these underlying motivations is an important first step in finding healthier alternatives. Self-harm is never the answer and can lead to serious complications.

The Dangers of Self-Inflicted Injuries

Intentionally breaking bones or causing other injuries carries severe risks that should not be taken lightly. Some potential dangers include:

• Permanent nerve damage
• Loss of mobility or function
• Chronic pain
• Infection
• Accidental severe injury beyond what was intended
• Scarring
• Worsening of mental health issues

Even seemingly “minor” self-harm can escalate over time as tolerance builds. What starts as a small injury could lead to increasingly dangerous behavior. The physical and emotional consequences are simply not worth the temporary relief self-harm may provide.

Healthy Coping Mechanisms for Emotional Pain

Instead of resorting to self-harm, there are many healthier ways to process difficult emotions and find relief. Some positive alternatives include:

1. Practice mindfulness meditation
2. Exercise to release endorphins
3. Journal to express your feelings
4. Create art as an emotional outlet
5. Talk to a trusted friend or therapist
6. Use ice on skin instead of cutting
7. Snap a rubber band on wrist
8. Scream into or punch a pillow
9. Take a cold shower
10. Listen to music that matches your mood

The key is finding healthy coping mechanisms that work for you personally. Experiment with different techniques to discover what provides emotional relief without causing harm.

Seeking Professional Help and Support

While self-help strategies are important, professional treatment is often necessary to address the root causes of self-harm urges. A mental health professional can provide:

• Proper diagnosis of underlying conditions
• Evidence-based therapies like CBT or DBT
• Medication if appropriate
• Coping skills training
• Safety planning
• Ongoing support and accountability

There’s no shame in seeking help. Reaching out takes courage and is a sign of strength, not weakness. With proper treatment, recovery from self-harm is possible.

Building a Strong Support Network

Having a reliable support system is crucial for overcoming self-harm urges. Some ways to build your support network include:

• Opening up to trusted friends and family
• Joining a support group for people with similar struggles
• Connecting with online communities focused on recovery
• Developing a relationship with a therapist or counselor
• Considering peer support programs

Remember, you don’t have to face this alone. Lean on others for encouragement, accountability, and understanding as you work towards healthier coping mechanisms.

Developing Emotional Regulation Skills

Learning to manage intense emotions in healthy ways is key to overcoming self-harm urges. Some emotional regulation techniques to practice include:

• Deep breathing exercises
• Progressive muscle relaxation
• Grounding techniques using your five senses
• Identifying and challenging negative thought patterns
• Using positive self-talk and affirmations
• Practicing self-compassion

These skills take time and practice to develop, but can be powerful tools for managing emotional distress without resorting to self-harm.

Creating a Safety Plan

Having a concrete plan in place for moments of crisis can help prevent self-harm. A good safety plan should include:

1. Warning signs that urges are increasing
2. Internal coping strategies to try first
3. People to contact for support
4. Professionals or agencies to call
5. Ways to make your environment safe
6. Reasons for living and staying safe

Review and update your safety plan regularly with your therapist or support system. Having this resource readily available can make a crucial difference in moments of intense urges.

Addressing Underlying Mental Health Issues

Self-harm is often a symptom of underlying mental health conditions that require treatment. Some common co-occurring issues include:

• Depression
• Anxiety disorders
• Borderline Personality Disorder
• Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
• Eating disorders
• Substance use disorders

Proper diagnosis and treatment of these conditions is essential for long-term recovery from self-harm urges. Work with a mental health professional to address any underlying issues comprehensively.

The Role of Medication

In some cases, medication may be recommended as part of treatment for self-harm and related mental health issues. Medications that might be prescribed include:

• Antidepressants
• Anti-anxiety medications
• Mood stabilizers
• Antipsychotics

Always take medications as prescribed and communicate any side effects or concerns with your healthcare provider. Medication can be an important tool in managing symptoms and reducing self-harm urges when used appropriately.

Practicing Self-Care and Stress Management

Engaging in regular self-care is crucial for maintaining emotional well-being and reducing the likelihood of self-harm urges. Some important aspects of self-care include:

• Getting adequate sleep
• Eating a balanced diet
• Exercising regularly
• Spending time in nature
• Engaging in hobbies and activities you enjoy
• Setting boundaries in relationships
• Practicing relaxation techniques

Prioritizing self-care isn’t selfish – it’s necessary for maintaining your mental and emotional health. Make self-care a non-negotiable part of your routine.

Stress Management Techniques

Learning to manage stress effectively can help reduce the intensity of self-harm urges. Some stress management strategies to try include:

1. Time management and prioritization
2. Breaking large tasks into smaller, manageable steps
3. Practicing saying “no” to unnecessary commitments
4. Regular exercise or physical activity
5. Mindfulness and meditation
6. Journaling or expressive writing
7. Seeking support when feeling overwhelmed

Experiment with different techniques to find what works best for you in managing stress levels.

Building Self-Esteem and Self-Worth

Low self-esteem often contributes to self-harm urges. Developing a stronger sense of self-worth is crucial for recovery. Some ways to build self-esteem include:

• Challenging negative self-talk
• Practicing self-compassion
• Setting and achieving small goals
• Engaging in activities you’re good at
• Surrounding yourself with supportive people
• Volunteering or helping others
• Practicing gratitude

Remember that your worth is not determined by your achievements, appearance, or what others think of you. You have inherent value as a human being.

Positive Affirmations

Using positive affirmations can help reshape negative thought patterns and boost self-esteem. Some examples of helpful affirmations include:

• “I am worthy of love and respect”
• “I am capable of handling life’s challenges”
• “My feelings are valid and important”
• “I choose to be kind to myself”
• “I am strong and resilient”

Repeat these affirmations daily, especially when struggling with negative thoughts or self-harm urges.

Developing Healthy Relationships

Surrounding yourself with supportive, positive relationships is crucial for recovery from self-harm. Some tips for developing healthy relationships include:

• Setting clear boundaries
• Communicating openly and honestly
• Practicing active listening
• Showing empathy and compassion
• Avoiding toxic or abusive relationships
• Seeking relationships based on mutual respect and support

Healthy relationships can provide crucial emotional support and help reinforce positive coping mechanisms.

Improving Communication Skills

Effective communication is key to building and maintaining healthy relationships. Some communication skills to practice include:

1. Using “I” statements to express feelings
2. Actively listening without interrupting
3. Asking clarifying questions
4. Expressing needs clearly and directly
5. Being open to feedback
6. Practicing non-verbal communication awareness

These skills can help you express your emotions and needs in healthier ways, reducing the urge to turn to self-harm.

Finding Meaning and Purpose

Developing a sense of meaning and purpose in life can provide motivation to overcome self-harm urges. Some ways to explore this include:

• Identifying your personal values
• Setting long-term goals aligned with those values
• Exploring spirituality or philosophy
• Engaging in volunteer work or community service
• Pursuing education or skill development
• Creating art or expressing yourself creatively

Having a sense of purpose beyond immediate emotional relief can provide strength and motivation during difficult times.

Creating a Vision Board

A vision board can be a powerful tool for visualizing your goals and aspirations. To create one:

1. Gather magazines, photos, and inspiring quotes
2. Cut out images and words that resonate with your goals
3. Arrange and glue them on a poster board
4. Display the board where you’ll see it daily
5. Regularly reflect on your vision and goals

This visual reminder of your hopes and dreams can provide motivation to choose healthy coping mechanisms over self-harm.

Celebrating Progress and Milestones

Recovery from self-harm is a journey, and it’s important to acknowledge and celebrate progress along the way. Some ideas for marking milestones include:

• Keeping a recovery journal to track progress
• Rewarding yourself for reaching goals
• Sharing achievements with your support system
• Creating a symbolic representation of your journey
• Writing a letter to your future self

Remember that every day without self-harm is a victory. Celebrate your strength and resilience in choosing healthier coping mechanisms.

Dealing with Setbacks

Setbacks are a normal part of the recovery process. If you experience a relapse:

1. Be gentle with yourself – avoid harsh self-criticism
2. Reach out to your support system
3. Review and adjust your safety plan
4. Learn from the experience – identify triggers
5. Recommit to your recovery goals
6. Seek additional support if needed

A setback doesn’t erase your progress. Use it as an opportunity to strengthen your coping skills and recommit to your recovery journey.

Remember, recovery from self-harm is possible with the right support, treatment, and coping strategies. If you’re struggling with self-harm urges, reach out for help. You deserve to live a life free from self-harm, filled with hope and healing.

Ways to Break the Ankle and Possible Complications

December 13, 2022December 13, 2022

Whenever a bone in your body cracks or breaks, it results in a fracture. Three dissimilar bones in your ankle are prone to fracture: tibia, fibula and talus. Tibia is the bigger of the main two bones in your lower leg and the fibula is basically the thinner bone of the main two bones in your lower leg. Both these bones can be felt at the outside of your ankle. The talus refers to a wedge-shaped little bone located very deep inside your ankle and is positioned between the end points of fibula, tibia and your heel bone. When pressure is applied on these bones, it can result in an ankle fracture. Let us find out the answer to the question ‘how to break the ankle’ in this article.

How to Break Your Ankle

1. Car accidents can often result in crushing injuries that can result in ankle fracture or even can break it for good.
2. Falling and tripping can break the bones in your feet and ankles. Also, if you jump from a height and land on your feet, it can result in ankle injuries.
3. Impact from heavy weights: When heavy weights fall on your foot, they can break your ankle.
4. Missteps: Sometimes, when you miss a step while climbing up the stairs or walking down, you can break your ankle.
5. Overuse: The weight-bearing bones in your feet and ankles are prone to stress. Strong, repetitive forces or overuse like running for long distances can result in tiny cracks in them. Moreover, stress fracture and bone thinning conditions like osteoporosis can also result in overuse of the bone, leading to ankle injuries.
6. Ice skating: Ice skating is another answer for the question “how to break your ankle”. When you do ice skating, you often fall on slipper and wet surface, trip time and again, or step into holes. These things can result in terrible ankle fractures and injuries.
7. Falling off the ladder: If you fall off the ladder, then you may break your ankle. A hit or fall to the ankle can easily break one or all the three major bones in the ankle joint. The injury may become intense at some point and can affect about two dozen bones in the foot.
8. Other ways to break your ankle

• When kicking the football, if you miss it and land the foot on the floor, it can result in ankle fracture.
• When you place the foot down in a wrong manner, stub toes on the furniture, twist the ankle or apply wrong pressure on the foot, you can break your ankle and lead to ankle fractures.
• If you want to break your ankle on purpose, then you should wedge the foot in things that restrict your foot’s movement. For instance, you should place it between two furniture pieces and then jump very quickly. Your foot won’t be able to move which would result in ankle injury, but it will hurt.

Now that you know how to break your ankle, let’s move on to discuss the complications you need to watch out for.

• Broken bones may result in loss of blood supply and result in their collapse, death, or can even result in those bones being reabsorbed in your body.
• Damage can affect the neighboring tissues.
• Sharp pieces of bone can sever or compress the nearby nerves or blood vessels.
• The surgeon might have to re-break the bones for aligning them surgically.
• The broken bone pieces may start rejoining while they are still unaligned.

If you don’t seek medical help right away, these complications can exacerbate.

When to See a Doctor

You need to pay a visit to a doctor under the following circumstances:

• If the pain worsens or isn’t improving by taking painkillers;
• If you develop medical problems that prevent you from walking properly;
• If you want to fly after undergoing an ankle surgery, you should consult your GP on the right time to fly.

You might need to return to the hospital if:

• There is numbness or pins and needles in the toes.
• The skin surrounding your foot or ankle turns blue.
• Ankle becomes badly swollen.
• A foul-smelling discharge oozes out from the surgical wound/point on your foot or ankle.
• You have problems with the plaster cast on your foot.

These problems are symptoms of issues with the blood supply to your ankle and the nerves in the ankle and should be treated timely.

What’s the best way to break your own leg?

Necati Bahadir Bermek/iStock/Getty Images Plus

Slate’s archives are full of fascinating stories. We’re republishing this article because it remains a reader favorite. It was originally published March 9, 2009.

com/_components/slate-paragraph/instances/clg1e6ekx00083b6u6njwbzqe@published”>Spanish authorities arrested a man wearing a cast of compressed cocaine at the Barcelona airport last Wednesday. The would-be trafficker had a genuine fracture of two bones below the knee; police are now investigating whether the injury was self-inflicted. What’s the safest way to break your own leg?

Immobilize your ankle and knee and use a heavy instrument with minimal surface area. It takes a surprising amount of pressure to break your shin. (In fact, the weight of an average American man would not be sufficient to fracture a leg, even if the mass were concentrated on a spot the size of a quarter.) To do the trick, you’ll first want to strap the leg to a fixed object—a cinderblock, maybe—below the knee and above the ankle. That will prevent your joints from buckling before the tibia breaks. Then you’ll want to choose the heaviest, smallest weapon with which you can reliably hit your target—a hammer would be more effective than a mallet, for example. The wound is likely to be quite unpleasant, so you might consider drugs to alleviate the pain. (Cocaine wouldn’t be a good choice, though—its analgesic effects are highly localized.)

According to news reports, the Chilean smuggler had an open fracture of the shin, meaning that the tibial shaft had cracked and broken through the skin. Open fractures in this area tend to be either spiral-shaped—caused by torsional forces such as twisting after falling from a great height—or transverse. The amount of force required to produce these injuries depends on a number of factors, including the location of the impact, the thickness of the soft tissue around the tibia, the condition of the bone, and the area across which the force is spread. As a rough estimate, it would take 218 pounds of pressure to produce a tibial fracture in a healthy adult using a hammer. You could decrease the force requirement by choosing a tool with less surface area, such as a hatchet—then again, you’d be increasing the risk of soft tissue damage and significant blood loss. In any case, it might be hard to generate that amount of force with your knee and ankle strapped down, so you may need the help of a friend.

There have been some reports of people breaking their own tibias without help. In 2008, an Australian kayaker who had become trapped in his boat by a fallen log leveraged his body weight (supported by the tremendous force of the current) to snap his tibia against the rim of the boat’s cockpit. The break enabled his trapped leg to collapse so he could escape the boat.

com/_components/slate-paragraph/instances/cq-article-403af0d7b265b603f7c714149bddaff0-component-5@published”>You may have heard stories about surgeons having to “re-break” bones that healed improperly after an initial fracture. Orthopedists don’t use blunt force to this end. Instead, they move the soft tissue aside and cut the bone using a very narrow power saw. In cases where complicated nerves or extensive vasculature border the cutting area, they will finish the cut with an osteotome, a kind of surgical chisel used to penetrate only a couple of millimeters. They would also use general anesthesia or a regional pain blocker with heavy sedation to dull the considerable pain.

Bonus Explainer: How do you compress cocaine into a cast? Dissolve it in liquid and pour the solution into a cast-shaped mold. The cocaine can then be recovered by chemical extraction with about 80 percent efficiency, depending on the process. Some news reports describe the cast as being “made entirely of compressed cocaine.” It would be possible to create a cast from relatively pure (greater than 90 percent) cocaine, but that would require the use of both a cast-shaped mold and a cast-shaped press.

Got a question about today’s news? Ask the Explainer.

Explainer thanks Robert Campbell of Mercy Medical Center and Stephen M. Pribut of George Washington University Medical School.

• Medicine

• From the Archives

Leg Fracture

You have a broken leg. The fracture is treated with a splint, plaster or a special boot. The fracture will take 4 to 6 weeks to heal. If you have a severe fracture, you may need surgery to treat it.

Home care

Follow these guidelines for home care:

• You will be given a splint or cast, a special boot or other device to keep your leg in place. Unless otherwise instructed, use crutches or a walker when walking. Do not step on the injured foot until you have received permission from your doctor to do so. (You can rent crutches or a walker from many pharmacies or surgical or orthopedic supply stores.)

• To reduce pain and swelling, keep your leg elevated. When you go to bed, put a pillow under your injured leg. When sitting, position your injured leg so that it is at waist level. This rule is very important to observe during the first 2 days (48 hours).

• Apply an ice pack to the injury. Apply an ice pack for 20 minutes every 1 to 2 hours during the first day to reduce pain. You can prepare an ice pack by wrapping a plastic bag of ice cubes in a thin towel. Make sure that when the ice melts, the plaster / splint / boot does not get wet. You can apply an ice pack directly over the splint or cast. For the next 2 days, continue to apply an ice pack 3-4 times a day. Then use an ice pack as needed to reduce pain and swelling.

• The cast/longuet/boot must always be kept dry. During washing, do not immerse the cast/longuet/boot in water. To prevent water from entering, wrap the bandage with a plastic bag, securing it at the top with a rubber band. If the boot, fiberglass splint or splint gets wet, you can dry it with a hair dryer.

• If you have not been prescribed other medicines, you can take acetaminophen (acetaminophen) or ibuprofen (ibuprofen) to reduce pain. If you have chronic liver disease or kidney disease, talk to your doctor before taking these medicines. You should also consult your doctor if you have had a stomach ulcer (stomach ulcer) or gastrointestinal bleeding (GI bleeding).

• If you experience itching, do not apply any creams under the cast or insert any objects.

Follow-up

See your doctor again in 1 week or as directed. This is necessary to make sure that the bone is healing properly. If a splint has been applied, it can be replaced with a plaster cast at the next visit to the doctor.

If x-rays have been taken, they will be reviewed by a radiologist. You will be informed of any results that may affect your treatment.

When to seek medical attention

Contact your healthcare provider immediately if any of the following occurs:

• There is a crack in the dressing

• Cast or splint is wet or soft

• GRP or splint stays wet for more than 24 hours

• Dressing has a foul odor or stains from wound discharge

• Feeling of tightness or pain under a cast or splint is aggravated

• Toes become swollen, cold, blue, numb, or tingly

• You can’t move your toes

• The skin around the dressing turns red

• Temperature 101 ºF (38. 3 ºC) or higher, or as directed by your healthcare professional

© 2000-2022 The StayWell Company, LLC. All rights reserved. This information is not intended as a substitute for professional medical care. Always follow your healthcare professional’s instructions.

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