  Persons who engage in non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI), often conceal their
practices which limits the examination and understanding of those who engage in
NSSI. The goal of this research is to utilize public online social networks
(namely, in LiveJournal, a major blogging network) to observe the NSSI
population's communication in a naturally occurring setting. Specifically,
LiveJournal users can publicly declare their interests. We collected the
self-declared interests of 22,000 users who are members of or participate in 43
NSSI-related communities. We extracted a bimodal socio-semantic network of
users and interests based on their similarity. The semantic subnetwork of
interests contains NSSI terms (such as "self-injury" and "razors"), references
to music performers (such as "Nine Inch Nails"), and general daily life and
creativity related terms (such as "poetry" and "boys"). Assuming users are
genuine in their declarations, the words reveal distinct patterns of interest
and may signal keys to NSSI.
