This campaign has now closed
Self-injurious behaviour (SIB) has a significant impact on quality of life for everyone concerned.... SIB can be defined as repeated, self-inflicted, non-accidental injury, that may produce bleeding or other tissue damage. Examples of SIB include head-banging, hand-biting, hair-pulling, face-slapping, skin picking or scratching. Professor Oliver, 2008 This project tackles the challenging issue through indentifying individual characteristics associated with an increased risk of developing self-injurious behaviours.
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Autism is not rare: there are said to be over 500,000 people with Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) in the UK. ASD is a lifelong developmental disability that affects the way a person communicates and relates to people around them. Self-injurious behaviour (SIB) is exhibited by a substantial number of children and adults with ASD. Generally, effective interventions are difficult to design and costly to implement in terms of both time and resources. Early intervention for SIB may help with this problem by preventing the behaviour from becoming ingrained and increasingly severe. It has also been reported that more severe self-injurious behaviour has a more long lasting course than less severe behaviour. This suggests that early identification of individuals at risk of developing more severe self-injurious behaviour may be extremely important. In order to effectively implement early intervention, identifying risk markers for those who may develop SIB would mean that people with ASD shown to have these risk markers could be targeted for intervention.This project aims to identify these early risk markers. A donation of £32,625 would complete the funding of the bursary required to undertake this project.