Tumblr's new policy will ban blogs posting "content that actively promotes or glorifies self-injury or self-harm. This includes content that urges or encourages readers to cut or mutilate themselves; embrace anorexia, bulimia, or other eating disorders; or commit suicide."

This could include pictures of cuts, burns, or scars; pictures of emaciated/ thin/ boney/ eating-disordered people; pictures of suicide; "thinspiration" ; or pictures of words (for example a photo of highlighted words from a book) about the issues self-harm, eating disorders, or suicide.

We, as the users of Tumblr, often post or reblog content such as this, but NOT for the purposes of encouraging others, or ourselves, to engage in damaging behaviour, or for the purpose of triggering our own or others' mental disorders. We simply post this content because it is an accurate representation of our own thoughts and feelings that we would not otherwise be able to express: to us it is a form of therapy.

We feel that taking this form of self-expression away from us would serve no other purpose than to damage us. This content is not posted with malicious intent: indeed, many of us have "trigger warnings" or disclaimers on our blogs stating this. We feel we cannot be held responsible for how viewers of our blogs interpret the content we post: they visit our blog in order to follow it, so can see the disclaimers, and after all they are not under duress to follow our blogs or view what we post.

In conclusion: the only change necessary is that blogs concerning these topics should at most be required to have a disclaimer or "trigger warning", or links to recovery sites on their main blog page. It is wrong to shut these blogs down, especially seeing as they have helped so many people suffering from mental disorders by offering them a network of support from other people going through the same thing.

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