Self-harm is common, especially in young people. It increases the likelihood that the person will eventually die by suicide by between 50- and 100-fold above the rest of the population in a 12-month period. A wide range of psychiatric conditions are associated with self-harm, such as borderline personality disorder, depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and drug and alcohol-use disorders.

The focus of this guideline is to improve the longer-term care of people who self-harm after initial treatment of the injury or poisoning (it covers people aged 8 years and older). It reviews the evidence for comprehensive assessment, psychosocial and pharmacological interventions for both the self-harm and for any associated psychiatric conditions, staff training, and consent, capacity and confidentiality issues. It contains all the evidence on which the recommendations were based, including further data on a CD-ROM.

The guideline will be useful to healthcare professionals in hospital medical care and mental health services, plus general practitioners - as about half of the people who attend an emergency department after an incident of self-harm will have visited their GP in the previous month.

NICE Mental Health Guidelines

These guidelines from NICE set out clear recommendations, based on the best available evidence, for health care professionals on how to work with and implement physical, psychological and service-level interventions for people with various mental health conditions.

The book contains the full guidelines that cannot be obtained in print anywhere else. It brings together all of the evidence that led to the recommendations made, detailed explanations of the methodology behind their preparation, plus an overview of the condition covering detection, diagnosis and assessment, and the full range of treatment and care approaches.

The accompanying free CD-ROM contains all the data used as evidence, including:

• Included and excluded studies.
• Profile tables that summarise both the quality of the evidence and the results of the evidence synthesis.
• All meta-analytical data, presented as forest plots.
• Detailed information about how to use and interpret forest plots.