" The mind that employed depersonalization to escape pain is now in danger of disintegrating. "It's really a life-threatening situation to have that experience," says San Francisco psychologist Michael Wagner. "It's equivalent to feeling that you are no longer going to exist." Ironically, cutting provides a sense of reintegration, like a jolt of reality to the vanishing self. The sensation of pain and the sight of blood break through the deadening depersonalization and prove that the cutter is alive, human, whole. "

― Marilee Strong , A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain