There's a lot of really unhelpful stigma around self-injury. Safety information is scattered and difficult to come by, and every time it comes up in the news it seems like someone else is trying to make talking honestly about it even harder (presumably driven by the desire not to think about the possibility that their child's self-injury or suicide might have something to do with them).
Obviously all of this mythologising only makes life harder for people who actually do self-injure, whether or not they want to stop. With this project I'm hoping to provide some useful information to other people who self-injure (not least of which the knowledge that not everyone thinks they're helpless victims of some kind of weird teenage fashion trend), and to contribute to the wider effort to improve the way we act around it as a society.
The physiological pain response has a big impact. In the immediate short term, self-injury works. Whether or not it works in the longer term varies between individuals and circumstances, but if you find it works for you then that's okay.