  Since the advent of online social media platforms such as Twitter and
Facebook, useful health-related studies have been conducted using the
information posted by online participants. Personal health-related issues such
as mental health, self-harm and depression have been studied because users
often share their stories on such platforms. Online users resort to sharing
because the empathy and support from online communities are crucial in helping
the affected individuals. A preliminary analysis shows how contents related to
non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) proliferate on Twitter. Thus, we use Twitter to
collect relevant data, analyse, and proffer ways of supporting users prone to
NSSI behaviour. Our approach utilises a custom crawler to retrieve relevant
tweets from self-reporting users and relevant organisations interested in
combating self-harm. Through textual analysis, we identify six major categories
of self-harming users consisting of inflicted, anti-self-harm, support seekers,
recovered, pro-self-harm and at risk. The inflicted category dominates the
collection. From an engagement perspective, we show how online users respond to
the information posted by self-harm support organisations on Twitter. By noting
the most engaged organisations, we apply a useful technique to uncover the
organisations' strategy. The online participants show a strong inclination
towards online posts associated with mental health related attributes. Our
study is based on the premise that social media can be used as a tool to
support proactive measures to ease the negative impact of self-harm.
Consequently, we proffer ways to prevent potential users from engaging in
self-harm and support affected users through a set of recommendations. To
support further research, the dataset will be made available for interested
researchers.
