Injecting without drugs
What do you do when someone come into an NSP who isn’t injecting drugs, this week I’d like to talk abit about someone I recently saw who has a different reason for injecting.
This time was slightly different, the person coming into the NSP was an ex-heroin user, and he wanted the needles and citric acid but not to inject drugs with.
Why?
We had a quite long chat it seems that he used injecting itself as a coping strategy for stress. He’d have a build up of feelings and emotions that would previously have lead to heroin use, but now he just injected water and citric acid, very much in the way someone with a history of self injury uses small cuts to relive stress.
We discussed what aspects of this made it help, he told me that it wasn’t really the ‘feeling’ of the injection as I would have expected but more the way it looked. His partner (who was now also drug free) kept encouraging him to attend a Narcotics Anonymous meeting but he didn’t like the way these worked and found they just increased stress levels.
Other strategies
We looked at different ways this he could cope using more appropriate methods, it seems that he used to be very found of art but said that he now has no patience to draw full pictures. I talked to him about the fact that even just a few lines on a page with some colour might help (this is an old technique for working with self injury).
I did talk to him about the extra risk he was adding by using an unneeded acidifier and tried to encourage him to just inject water if he felt a continued need, we also discussed using boiled water from a cold tap and allowing it to cool (our project doesn’t have access to water in amp form).
Self injury
This visitor appeared to be very stable as far as their mental health is concerned, and I felt at the time that them using injecting as a coping strategy did have some risks, both because of the injection itself and because it kept them ‘skilled’ at injecting which makes a possible relapse easier. But I do feel that this may be the most appropriate coping skill they currently had to deal with stresses and that by doing this they probably avoided doing themselves more harm either by relapsing or worse.
We've had a few unusual exchanges on this blog now, I'd be interested in hearing from other workers and injectors on some of the things they've seen, let me know in the comments.
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