Self-inflicted harm as a response to Stress

Point of Curiosity: In an extreme stress situation, is banging one's head against a wall / floor / etc. a common response and if so, why (biologically speaking)?

About twice a year, I briefly and adamantly declare that I'm going to quit my job and dedicate the rest of my life to the study of Endocrinology. Ever since reading The Human Brain by Isaac Asimov in college, I've been deeply fascinated by this system that overshadows our decision-making processes, our interactions, our most basic perceptions of reality.

As a chronic sufferer of PMS (one ovary gives me horrific PMS, while the other one is almost totally symptom-free), I think about Endocrinology a lot. And I'm no longer a teenager; I've been through the experience enough to know that my mood-related symptoms due to PMS feel normal at the time because it's a lot like boiling a frog. The frog's normal evolves with the rising temperature of the water, and my normal evolves with the rising hormones of the over-zealous ovary. I spent years being convinced, at the time it happened, that I was completely justified in reacting to small infractions, only to be ashamed in hindsight. Sure, whatever the thing was, it did bother me, but at a completely different magnitude than PMS would have me believe. Chemicals fundamental to my perception of reality told me I was mad.

Recently, I've been thinking about our stress response a lot. My favourite framing of this comes from Ash Beckham in her outstanding TEDxBoulder Talk "Coming Out of the Closet" who notes:

When you encounter a perceived threat - key word 'perceived' - your hypothalamus sounds the alarm and adrenaline and cortisol start coursing through your veins. [...] this is a totally normal reaction. And, comes from a time when that threat was being chased by a wooly mammoth. The problem is, your hypothalamus has no idea if you're being chased by a wooly mammoth, or if your computer just crashed, of if your in-laws just showed up on your doorstep, or if you're about to jump out of a plane, or if you need to tell someone you love that you have a brain tumor.

I was also struck by parallels between Ta-Nehisi Coates' teenage experience in crack-era Washington D.C. as described in his autobiography The Beautiful Struggle and my teenage experience in a significantly safer suburban neighborhood in eastern Kansas. I was bewildered to find a lot of common ground in the hyper-vigilance we developed in our respective environments, and only the cluelessness of the hypothalamus in stress stimulus could possibly account for it. Our experiences were so wildly different.

To the point of curiosity at hand: I witnessed a self-inflicted head injury - literally banging one's head against a wall - due to a stress response that kept escalating. Warning signs prior to this included full-body shaking and an inability to speak.

And it made me wonder, is this a thing? Does the head-banging have a purpose, one that potentially has some kind of benefit? Could it, for instance, disrupt an escalating stress response in the endocrine system? Is it an instinct to become unconscious, or something else?

My Google Fu isn't always the best, but I quickly found a 2011 article that confirmed my hypothesis wasn't entirely without merit, that this head-banging may have an actual "positive" (for a specific and relative definition of "positive", admittedly) impact on the endocrine system. The journal Psychoneuroendocrinology has an article, "Alterations in the neuroendocrinological stress response to acute psychosocial stress in adolescents engaging in nonsuicidal self-injury", which concluded from a very small trial (28 participants) that women who engage in Nonsuicidal Self-Injury (NSSI) experience reduced cortisol confirmed by a saliva test.

Which, of course, immediately caused me a follow-up question:

What is an HPA Axis?

The HPA Axis is the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis. Both the organs and their influence and interactions on and with each other make up this axis. This immediately lead me to a model called the General Adaptation Syndrome (yes, GAS) developed by Hans Selye which explains an organism's response to a stressor, real or imagined.

There are three core stages defined in the syndrome: Alarm, Resistance and Exhaustion.

During the Alarm stage, we get the familiar adrenaline rush and our body starts releasing cortisol. Shock happens during the Alarm stage.

During the Resistance stage, the cortisol really ramps up. All kinds of resources get thrown into the bloodstream to help us resist or deal with the stressor.

There's different ways to exit via the Exhaustion stage: either the stressor is eliminated and we enter a Recovery stage, or the stressor remains and eventually our body's resources are depleted.

For another time, my follow-up question from that is, could self-harm be an attempt to abort the Resistance stage before hitting the Exhaustion stage?

I have so much more I want to learn about all of this, but for the moment, my lazy no-libraries-only-internet starter answer is: I don't know if the head-banging is a common response but there's a maybe to it having a potentially cortisol-reducing effect if we can assume self-inflicted head injury is similar to other kinds of NSSI like cutting.

Coppin State, Cheyney University and Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU)

Point of Curiosity: What's Coppin State's context in Black History?

I just finished reading The Beautiful Struggle by Ta-Nehisi Coates.  In it was this mention of Coppin State and I wanted to understand the broader context.

We were one of six gifted classes on the Thurgood Marshall Team. I don't know how gifted any of us were - more likely we had parents in the race, mothers who worked for the city, got their degrees from Coppin State. They'd gone far enough to know what was out there and what they'd missed in the manner of their coming up. These are the parents the intellectuals erase in their treatises on black pathology. But I saw them in effect at Lemmel, that and teachers always with an eye for children who were two seconds faster and seemed to be bound for something more than the corner or Jessup.

Coppin State University (CSU) is in Baltimore, MD. It was founded in 1900 to train African-Americans for teaching in elementary schools. Over the course of the 20th century, it evolved from a one year program taught at a local high school to today where it offers 53 majors and nine graduate programs including Teaching and Special Education. One of its interesting projects is the reform and management of local Rosemont Elementary School starting in 1998. In 1997, the school was put on the Maryland State Department of Education (MSDE)'s watch list as below acceptable standards. With guidance from CSU, it was removed from that watch list in 2003.

As I read about Coppin State, I hit on an interesting wonderlust tangent: Coppin State is one of 107 historically black colleges and universities (HBCU) in the United States. Most were created after the Civil War and prior to the civil rights changes that came in the 1960s. Two were created for black education prior to the Civil War, and the founding of Cheyney University in particular caught my eye.

Emlen Hall Reading Room, ca. 1900s (src)

In 1837, Cheyney University was founded in Pennsylvania by a Quaker philanthropist named Richard Humphreys. He bequeathed $10,000 - one-tenth of his estate - to the endeavour, after the race riots of 1829. I would love to have learned about Humphreys in my American history classes in public high school, and about the men and women who first got their education at this institution. Humphreys, to me, is a patriot. My favourite patriots are the ones who saw problems unique to the United States and pro-actively enacted solutions at a grassroots level.

Per the history on Cheyney University's web site:

Born on a plantation in the West Indies, Richard Humphreys came to Philadelphia in 1764. Having witnessed the struggles of African Americans competing unsuccessfully for jobs due to the influx of immigrants, he became interested in their plight. In 1829, race riots heightened and it was that year Richard Humphreys wrote his will and charged thirteen fellow Quakers to design an institution: "...to instruct the descendents of the African Race in school learning, in the various branches of the mechanic Arts, trades and Agriculture, in order to prepare and fit and qualify them to act as teachers...."

I'm frustrated at the difficulty I'm having in finding more information about Humphreys and the Cheyney foundation that isn't just parroting the sparse Wikipedia article. A few to follow up on:
The Crisis Aug 1940 "CHEYNEY: Quaker Heritage"
Sing to me David by Thomas McCavour, which mentions that the education was provided free to qualified students.

Follow-up questions:

• Are there any biographies by early students of Coppin State or Cheyney University?
• Who are some of the interesting alumni of Coppin State and Cheyney University?
• Is there a book on Richard Humphreys or any of the 13 board members designated to design what would become Cheyney University?