Over the last decade it’s been exciting to see a real groundswell in Sociology around the need to think carefully and critically about stigma. A brilliant example of this is the collection Recalibrating Stigma: Sociologies of Health and Illness edited by Gareth Thomas, Oli Williams, Tanisha Spratt and Amy Chandler and published last year. The volume joins Imogen Tyler’s exciting monograph Stigma: The Machinery of Inequality, published in 2020. This attention is much-needed because, as Thomas et al note, stigma is a concept much beloved by public health and by advocacy groups. Turning a critical eye to such campaigns, as this blog has done itself in the past, is an important part of what Sociology can bring to public discourse.
Yet I want to make the case for thinking a little more broadly in our approach to shame and stigma – specifically, I want to make the case for working in interdisciplinary ways, bringing a more Cultural Sociology approach to our thinking on this topic. In their co-authored chapter in the collection ‘Recalibrating Anti-Stigma: Avoiding Binary Thinking and ‘Destigmatisation Drift’ in Public Health’, Williams, Chandler, Thomas, and Spratt use self-harm as a key case study. They explore the hotly contested debates over the censorship of self-harm content on the internet, and the way that minimising stigma and avoiding the normalisation of self-harm can lead to conflicting priorities. They conclude by recognising that stigma is often not straightforwardly present or absent, that social movements or campaigns aren’t easily categorised into ‘pro-’ or ‘anti-stigma’ positions.
This is a call I certainly endorse – I think one way it might be answered is by paying attention to narrative, story, and fiction. At the end of 2025 I published an article on shame and narratives of self-harm, where I draw on interviews I conducted as part of my PhD research with people with experience of self-harm. The article’s central argument is that, while self-harm is often taken to be (and even experienced as) inherently shameful or stigmatised (Potter 2011, Long 2018) this is not necessarily the case. The people I spoke to talked about countries or situations where self-harm might feel more or less shameful, and they talked about other practices – such as binge eating – that felt shameful in contrast to self-harm which did not. Rather than taking shamefulness as a natural characteristic of self-harm, these conversations encouraged me to see self-harm’s shame as constructed, and at least in part constructed through culture, narrative, and specifically fiction. That is to say, it is in part the way we narrate self-harm that makes it shameful, stories that act as a conduit for shame, passing it from the characters they depict to the bodies of readers and viewers.
In the paper I talk about some of the ways that fiction does this. First, I suggest that films, books, or TV shows sometimes position self-harming characters as examples of a character “type” – self-harm becomes a practice enacted by a shameful sort of person, a person who is weird, broken, pathetic, and immature. This is achieved by the way that fiction presents the characters who self-harm, often before self-harm appears at all. This type becomes a sort of inevitability – for readers and viewers who self-harm themselves, it is easy to feel that they must belong to this type, that they too are a shameful sort of person.
Second, I talk about how self-harm is framed within a story – particularly, the way that it is often discovered by or revealed to other characters. Through narrative structure self-harm comes to seem like something that is judged – no matter how kindly the other characters respond. To reveal some is to be judged, and thus to be ashamed and to be seen as shameful. Finally I talked about genre, melodrama, and sentimentality. For some participants, what was particularly shameful was when self-harm was associated with bad fiction. If the stories we tell about self-harm seem trite and hackneyed, then it can feel like the real people who self-harm have placed themselves within such a story just by self-harming. To self-harm starts to feel like it makes you melodramatic, that it makes you a person who likes melodrama, and who engages in self-harm as part of it. This is shameful indeed.
This might seem like a far cry from critiques of public health campaigns and their futility in a overburdened, under-resourced health system. But I think it’s important to pay attention to, because while stigma and shame might be communicated in many different ways, culture and fiction is certainly one of them. And paying attention to how this happens helps us to complicate and deepen our understanding of what stigma is and how it functions. Paying attention to the way that shame works by association – by associating self-harm with a character type, or with moments of discovery and judgement, or with bad, embarrassing art – might help us to explain why campaigns to ‘understand self-harm better’ aren’t always effective at reducing stigma. Facts and figures don’t hold the same emotional weight as the stories my participants described.
If Sociology (and Sociologists) want to understand how stigma works, and what Williams et al describe as its “complexity, inconsistency, and diversity” (2025, pg 118), I think paying attention to culture might be a good place to start. Fiction makes experiences come alive – this can act in multifaceted, complex, and contradictory ways, but the power of this aliveness is undeniable. Sociological writing on stigma and shame would do well to take this into account.
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Shame, Stigma, and Self-Harm: Complicating Narratives
Jan 14, 2026
Shame, Stigma, and Self-Harm: Complicating Narratives
by Veronica Heney Jan 14, 2026Over the last decade it’s been exciting to see a real groundswell in Sociology around the need to think carefully and critically about stigma. A brilliant example of this is the collection Recalibrating Stigma: Sociologies of Health and Illness edited by Gareth Thomas, Oli Williams, Tanisha Spratt and Amy Chandler and published last year. The volume joins Imogen Tyler’s exciting monograph Stigma: The Machinery of Inequality, published in 2020. This attention is much-needed because, as Thomas et al note, stigma is a concept much beloved by public health and by advocacy groups. Turning a critical eye to such campaigns, as this blog has done itself in the past, is an important part of what Sociology can bring to public discourse.
Yet I want to make the case for thinking a little more broadly in our approach to shame and stigma – specifically, I want to make the case for working in interdisciplinary ways, bringing a more Cultural Sociology approach to our thinking on this topic. In their co-authored chapter in the collection ‘Recalibrating Anti-Stigma: Avoiding Binary Thinking and ‘Destigmatisation Drift’ in Public Health’, Williams, Chandler, Thomas, and Spratt use self-harm as a key case study. They explore the hotly contested debates over the censorship of self-harm content on the internet, and the way that minimising stigma and avoiding the normalisation of self-harm can lead to conflicting priorities. They conclude by recognising that stigma is often not straightforwardly present or absent, that social movements or campaigns aren’t easily categorised into ‘pro-’ or ‘anti-stigma’ positions.
This is a call I certainly endorse – I think one way it might be answered is by paying attention to narrative, story, and fiction. At the end of 2025 I published an article on shame and narratives of self-harm, where I draw on interviews I conducted as part of my PhD research with people with experience of self-harm. The article’s central argument is that, while self-harm is often taken to be (and even experienced as) inherently shameful or stigmatised (Potter 2011, Long 2018) this is not necessarily the case. The people I spoke to talked about countries or situations where self-harm might feel more or less shameful, and they talked about other practices – such as binge eating – that felt shameful in contrast to self-harm which did not. Rather than taking shamefulness as a natural characteristic of self-harm, these conversations encouraged me to see self-harm’s shame as constructed, and at least in part constructed through culture, narrative, and specifically fiction. That is to say, it is in part the way we narrate self-harm that makes it shameful, stories that act as a conduit for shame, passing it from the characters they depict to the bodies of readers and viewers.
In the paper I talk about some of the ways that fiction does this. First, I suggest that films, books, or TV shows sometimes position self-harming characters as examples of a character “type” – self-harm becomes a practice enacted by a shameful sort of person, a person who is weird, broken, pathetic, and immature. This is achieved by the way that fiction presents the characters who self-harm, often before self-harm appears at all. This type becomes a sort of inevitability – for readers and viewers who self-harm themselves, it is easy to feel that they must belong to this type, that they too are a shameful sort of person.
Second, I talk about how self-harm is framed within a story – particularly, the way that it is often discovered by or revealed to other characters. Through narrative structure self-harm comes to seem like something that is judged – no matter how kindly the other characters respond. To reveal some is to be judged, and thus to be ashamed and to be seen as shameful. Finally I talked about genre, melodrama, and sentimentality. For some participants, what was particularly shameful was when self-harm was associated with bad fiction. If the stories we tell about self-harm seem trite and hackneyed, then it can feel like the real people who self-harm have placed themselves within such a story just by self-harming. To self-harm starts to feel like it makes you melodramatic, that it makes you a person who likes melodrama, and who engages in self-harm as part of it. This is shameful indeed.
This might seem like a far cry from critiques of public health campaigns and their futility in a overburdened, under-resourced health system. But I think it’s important to pay attention to, because while stigma and shame might be communicated in many different ways, culture and fiction is certainly one of them. And paying attention to how this happens helps us to complicate and deepen our understanding of what stigma is and how it functions. Paying attention to the way that shame works by association – by associating self-harm with a character type, or with moments of discovery and judgement, or with bad, embarrassing art – might help us to explain why campaigns to ‘understand self-harm better’ aren’t always effective at reducing stigma. Facts and figures don’t hold the same emotional weight as the stories my participants described.
If Sociology (and Sociologists) want to understand how stigma works, and what Williams et al describe as its “complexity, inconsistency, and diversity” (2025, pg 118), I think paying attention to culture might be a good place to start. Fiction makes experiences come alive – this can act in multifaceted, complex, and contradictory ways, but the power of this aliveness is undeniable. Sociological writing on stigma and shame would do well to take this into account.