Asensio Cruz, Sara and Hodge, Suzanne and Kelly, James and Darrell-Berry, Hannah (2021) The experiences of men who self-harm : A qualitative analysis. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.
![[thumbnail of 2021Asensio-CruzDClinPsy]](https://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/style/images/fileicons/text.png)
Abstract
This thesis is comprised of four chapters, including a systematic literature review, an empirical research paper, a critical appraisal, and the ethics application section. The systematic literature review offers a meta-synthesis of the published literature exploring the experiences of men who self-harm in forensic secure hospitals and prisons. Five papers were included in the review, four were conducted in prisons and one in a forensic secure hospital. The results were synthesised using a meta-ethnographic approach. The empirical paper is a qualitative investigation that explores the experiences of young men who self-harm, attending to the relational and communicative aspects of these behaviours. This study utilised semistructured interviews to gather the perspectives of five young men who self-harm and the data was analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. The critical appraisal offers an overview of both papers, highlighting the main findings, as well as difficulties that arose during the research process, and the key clinical and research implications of the whole thesis. Personal reflections are also offered. The last section includes the ethics application process of the empirical paper and the supporting documents utilised in the process.