Allowing harm because we care: Self-injury and harm minimisation

Harm minimisation has been proposed as a means of supporting people who self-injure. When adopting this approach, rather than trying to stop self-injury immediately the person is allowed to injure safely whilst developing more appropriate ways of dealing with distress. The approach is controversial as the health care professional actively allows harm to occur. This paper will consider a specific objection to harm minimisation. That is, it is a misguided collaboration between the health care professional and the person who self-injures that is morally and clinically questionable. The objection has two components. The first component is moral in nature and asserts that the health care professional is complicit in any harm that occurs and as a result they can be held morally responsible and subject to moral blame. The second component is clinical in nature and suggests that harm minimisation involves the health care professional in colluding in the perpetuation of self-injury. This element of the objection is based on a psychodynamic understanding of why self-injury occurs and it is argued that harm minimisation is merely a mechanism for avoiding thinking about the psychotherapeutic issues that need to be addressed. Thus, the health care professional merely reinforces a dysfunctional pattern of behaviour and supports the perpetuation of self-injury. I will consider this objection and argue that it fails on both counts. I conclude that the use of harm minimisation techniques is an appropriate form of intervention that is helpful to certain individuals in some situations.

The Anti-Federalist Strand in Progressive Politics and Political Thought

In this article, the author argues that the Progressives can be as much characterized as the antistatists of the nineteenth century as the statists of the twentieth century because their overriding goal was the destruction of the party state and not, directly, the creation of the bureaucratic state. They found in Anti-Federalist political thought a general antistatist template that they used to articulate their specific objection to the nineteenth-century party state. This template comprised a mutual commitment to simple government, the common good as a preinstitutional reality, democracy, direct and responsive government, fear of elite rule, civic education, and cultural homogeneity.

A Comment on Electoral Forecasting from Poll Data

I heartily approve of research based upon poll data, in which I include specifically the contribution by Paul Whiteley, ‘Electoral Forecasting from Poll Data: The British Case’ (this Journal, IX (1979), 219–36). I note with pleasure the fact that the author has relied heavily upon Gallup data for the testing of his time-series model. There is one specific objection that I have to the detail of the contents of this paper. I refer to the sentence bridging pages 231–2, in which he states: ‘the large inaccuracy of the 1951 forecast is not, in fact, due to the model so much as Gallup data, which were extremely inaccurate in that year’. There is a footnote which states that this was inferred from the residuals of the forecasting model. The error quoted is 8·3 per cent. This does refer to the last pre-campaign poll, admittedly. The last campaign poll, the only one that could be compared with the result itself, shows, according to Gallup records, a deviation of 2·2 per cent. The bland assertion of Mr Whiteley that our results were inaccurate in that year is totally unsupported by any evidence of a practical kind. Instead we have the statement that the fit of the model was rather bad on this occasion. Remembering that public opinion, including support for a specific political party, is known to change radically between elections, between local elections and by-elections, and so on (I confine myself here to actual elections – I do not depend upon poll data to substantiate my case) and knowing that among the causes of this are political events, and events of a social and economic nature which affect the mood and attitude of the electorate, it does not surprise me that a purely mathematical model does not necessarily fit from time to time. Indeed elsewhere in the article the author mentions the possibility of shocks affecting public opinion and the degree to which these shocks are effected in the auto-regressive scheme that he has put forward.