A broad analysis of childhood bullying and the link with suicide has found that it’s not just the victims of bullying who are at risk. Bullies themselves also are more likely to have suicidal thoughts.
The finding comes from a review of bullying research from 13 countries. Researchers from the Yale School of Medicine have found that both bullies and their victims appear to be at high risk for suicidal thoughts, according to the report published in the International Journal of Adolescent Medicine and Health.
“While there is no definitive evidence that bullying makes kids more likely to kill themselves, now that we see there’s a likely association, we can act on it and try to prevent it,” wrote lead author Dr. Young-Shin Kim, assistant professor at Yale School of Medicine’s Child Study Center, in a press release.
The review analyzed 37 studies that looked at bullying and suicide among children and adolescents. The studies took place in the United States, Canada, several European countries, South Korea, Japan and South Africa. Almost all of the studies showed a link between being bullied and suicidal thoughts among children.
Bullying tormentors also are at risk. Compared to other kids, a child who bullies may be at two to nine times higher risk for suicide, according to the study. Girl bullies appear to be at highest risk. Some researchers have also found a “dose-response” relationship, showing that those who bully more frequently are at highest risk for suicide.
While the studies showed an association with bullying and suicide, it wasn’t clear whether the behavior actually increases risk for suicide or whether kids already at risk for suicide are more likely to become bullies or their victims. The researchers noted that most of the studies failed to take into account the influence of factors like gender, psychiatric problems and a history of suicide attempts.
According to international studies, bullying is common and affects anywhere from 9 percent to 54 percent of children.
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http://www.bullies2buddies.com/
Bullies to Buddies, one of my favorite resources for parents and teachers.
— Dr. CI’d be curious to know whether there’s any correlation between childhood bullying and suicidal thoughts later in life.
— SteveInteresting study but I suspect they will find bullying does not “cause” suicidal behavior. Bullies usually have problems in the home, witness hostility between their parents, etc. Bullying (and being bullied) should not be seen as two separate kids with two separate problems, but instead be seen as a single situation involving two “participant/victims.”
Also, bullies are often not popular kids either. They provide entertainment for popular kids (by kicking the victim around - which “well-adjusted” popular kids often seem to enjoy watching) but are not considered “one of them” either. When evaluating a victim-bully situation, teachers and school administrators should also ask, “Who’s eating the popcorn at this show, anyway?”
— JenThe article seems to be trying to link the behavior of bullying with the action of suicide, and admits to ignoring other underlying factors. Usually when youths start bullying it is a result of troubles at home with parents, or other instabilities in their own environment. If there is an increased suicide rate, it is probably better linked to these home instabilities than bullying. They are both symptoms of deeper issues.
— blinkAs father of a daugher who suffered bullying from students (and even a few teachers) of a psychological nature; I can only say there is not a deep enough pit in hell for bullies. The adverse effects are long lasting; the means of detecting and controlling it are meager, and those few measures that can be taken are frankly ill-enforced by school faculty. In my daughter’s case, is seemed the teachers just didn’t want to be bothered, and this was at one of the best regarded elementary schools in Knoxville.
I am pleased too hear that bullies are suicidal; and I hope they follow through on their inclinations. They are negative forces, beyond the comprehension of anyone who has never seen this at a personal level, and we just don’t need them around.
— MargretFROM TPP — I expected a response like this and, as a parent, can relate to the pain you feel when your child is in pain. However, perhaps if researchers can learn more about the psychological and emotional lives of bullies, we can find ways to intervene sooner and stop the bad behavior at the source.
I have to admit this :It’s hard to find sympathy for a bully.
I was terrorised in school so badly that today I still carry the mental and physical scars well into adulthood. AS well it effected my education and made me loathe school to no end, why should I want to go to a place where life was so frightening and miserable??? Sadly this was back in the “kids will be kids” days when School administrations( I went to school in Littleton Colorado no less!) had no bully policies, regardless of the injuries me and my friends sustained on a regular basis! When Colombine happened I stood there watching on tv and said(Even though it had been little under ten years since I’d been in that school system.) ” I know why this happened…” Because the way those schools ran back then it was bound to happen!
BTW I found Indiana Schools to be much better in handling Bullying pre-Columbine( as thankfully I moved away!)
This article hit closer to home than any of the ones about diet/weight.
I do know one thing, I believe that bullying does amplify suicidal tendancies as the victim caqn no longer cope and just wants out, why as bully would feel more suicidal than the victim of thier abuse, I don’t quite understand.
But I did find this very interesting and hope it gets as many comments as the weight/diet posts!
— LOlivierAs a victim of bullies myself, hearing that some bullies are suicidal is music to my ears.
— Andrew in PhoenixSorry, Jen, when it comes to bullying, there are not two “victim-participants,” there is the predator (the bully) and the prey (the bullied). My son was bullied by both students and teachers, and we intervened effectively, and he came through mentally healthy and able to cope. We:
— Beyond Bullied1) read “Bullying” by Dan Olweus, and intervened at school to force the school to mete out consequences to the students, and threatened to file charges of assault and battery against the student if the school did not discipline the bully.
2) Moved our child to a different school, at the same time we . .
3) Had him see a therapist, who told him that he had to hit the bully back, or he would always be the victim.
4) We sent him to Krav Maga, a self-defense course (used by the Israeli Defense Force and many local policemen) which taught him how to fight back (karate did not work).
5) Gave him permission to fight back.
6) When he fought back, he was suspended, along with the bully, for breaking the zero tolerance rule for fighting. No student ever bullied him at that school again.
7) We have lobbied against zero tolerance rules and suspensions of students who are defending themselves. We have not yet won this battle.
8) I have noticed that the students who bullied our son, beginning in preschool, all went on to get into more serious trouble, many of them dropping out of high school. Our son went on to a fine college. He is a sensitive musician, majoring in the sciences. It appears the principal who suspended our son for defending himself allegedly failed to discipline a teacher who allegedly molested many children at his school.
9) Our schools need to give children the right to defend themselves against bullies; colleges need to stop discriminating against students who report they have been suspended for fighting–there is a good chance the fighting was to defend themselves. The bully is probably not applying to college. The fear of a suspension on one’s high school record stops many victims of bullying from defending themselves.
10) Parents need to keep fighting for their child’s right to a peaceful school setting. They cannot expect educators to help them.
Good luck!
This brings up bad feelings for me.
I wasn’t bullied, I was the bully. Just b4 adolescence I bullied a boy at school….not prolonged or intense, but i’m sure it affected him deeply. Why, I have no idea. Maybe because I came from a home situation where argument and conflict were the norm, I had no power, no identity and no ability to carve out a sense of who I was.
I’ve spent my life being ashamed of what I did to that poor kid. I’d have loved to find him an apologize to him, but of course that would just help heal my wounds at his expense. So I say a prayer for him occasionally.
— No NameMy daughter was horribly bullied in middle school. When I brought the matter up to other parents, I invariably got the answer “Your daughter is too sensitive”. They could not accept that their children were just plain mean. One sympathetic teacher strongly suggested that we transfer our daughter to private school, which fortunately, we were able to do. At the time, I told her that one day, a child who had no resources would solve his problem with a gun.
As circumstances would have it, a few years later, there was both a killing of a bully and a suicide of a victim at the middle school. Guess which event caused the most stir? I view both these tragedies as murders. Until schools and parents take this problem seriously, they will continue to happen.
— clareI was a victim of bullying for 10 years starting around the age of 9 until graduating high school. A lot of the individuals who played around with me had sociopathic personalities. I do not feel bad if bullies commit suicide.
They are are part of the problem for why our education system is so bad. You cannot have a situation at school where kids do not feel safe. By college, I no longer would play the part of the victim and to this day, I do not take shit from anyone. This has caused problems at work and my personal life, but given the alternatives, that is OK.
When I was 13 a bully at school put a knife towards my back, holding it there, and said, “If you ever tell anyone about this, I will cut your throat.” To this day, I hate this person. At the time, the adults would not help me because I was kind of an eccentric child in a religious day school. They actively affirmed these kids behaviors by not inviting me to school events or gossiping about me and my parents. I carry a lot of scars from this period, as well as a lot of anger.
What bullies get away with is mind blowing. We have to stand up and protect our kids from these fiends. When I have kids, I will pay for self defense classes and tell them that if someone threatens you, YOU HAVE TO FIGHT BACK, or you will be a victim for the rest of your life.
Sorry for the long discourse, but this touched a nerve.
— Hates BulliesI have wondered if the schools can be sued for failing to stop bullying. After all, we are required by law to send our children to school; it would seem that to be required to send them into an unsafe situation should be illegal.
— Charlene GrovesI think Jen is right that administrators do need to ask “who’s eating the popcorn at this show.” But in my adolescence, it WAS the popular kids doing the bullying, and the teachers who were “eating the popcorn.”
It’s absurd and victim-blaming to say that there are two “participant/victims” in a bullying situation. I was prey. I have never completely recovered.
Bullies do it because they like it. They may be insecure, or have problems at home, or emotional instability which makes them suicidal. But the home problems of bullies need to be addressed without further involving their victims. The reason they inflict pain on others is because they enjoy it.
And the reason that many adults and teachers won’t do anything to help a victim is that on some level, they enjoy watching it.
— Emily B.To Charlene Groves, #12:
Ah, but you’re NOT required to send your children there. I won’t be–I have no interest whatsoever in what was done to me being done to my children. Google “unschooling.”
But yes, the schools should all be sued for being accessories.
— Emily B.I agree with those who have little compassion for bullies. Do they have issues? Sure. Yet the place to address those issues is in therapy or through other supportive resources.
In response to # 12, probably in some school districts a suit for failure to stop bullying would at least survive dismissal.
One difficulty is that the parents of bullies are (guess!) bullies and they often get in the way of effective discipline.
The nightmare is that bullies grow up. More and more we see personality disorders (no one can call anything “bad character” anymore). Where bad behavior has a number of payoffs, who would want to change?
— marymaryA few people in the comments are falling back on the “bullies are just insecure victims too” stereotype, but hasn’t recent research found that bullies are actually more confident, and not insecure, as the stereotype would have us believe?
It seems that most children consider bullying as part of their social discovery process, but most students do not execute.
So those who are able to convince themselves to execute a persistent, harsh bullying situation despite the legal, social, and empathy-related barriers have set themselves outside a psychological norm. Therefore, it makes sense that they would be prone to other behaviors that a typical child might avoid, such as suicide or illegal behaviors.
I’d like to know whether bullies are more or less likely to be involved in extra curriculars or advanced classes… i.e. how much they perceive themselves as having to lose in the immediate future if they get caught breaking the rules.
— ChristinaRegarding author’s response to comment #5 above; you do not understand. Bullies need to be gone. I’ve no desire to see them rehabilitated, even if they can be; by the time they’ve shown themselves to be bullies, the damage is done. The seriousness of this crime is routinely underestimated, excused, and otherwise downplayed. They are not worth saving.
— MargretThe issue is a difficult one. I was a victim of severe bullying, but understanding the perspective of the bully was crucial to my healing.
From third grade until I was graduated from high school, I did not have a single school day in which I was not bullied in some way. I tried fighting back, rising above it, playing past it - nothing worked. I was the weird kid - spoke differently, interested in different things - and that was simply the way of it. At this time, parents and teachers alike regarded such behavior as normal, and dealing with it was simply part of the challenge of being me. I do not recall thinking of myself as a victim, more like someone who had landed on another planet with hostile inhabitants.
In my late twenties I saw a pattern of self-sabotage and sought therapy. I began to realize how bullying and other aspects of my childhood heavily influenced my ability to reach for my goals. I was filled with resentment at this understanding, and began to have anger issues.
But here’s what I eventually learned: having been bullied/abused/whatever, there were two handles I could take on the matter. One was this, that my fellow humans had betrayed and abused and mocked me for their own enjoyment, through no fault of my own, and that this was the “reality” of people - we are all selfish and cruel under the skin, and I should simply give in to that.
The other was that my fellow humans behaved selfishly and cruelly because it’s what they were taught, probably through their own abuse. In this case my goal should be to teach otherwise, to be kind, and turn the other cheek. To take this path is to redeem my tormentors and give hope to the next person.
I can’t judge why I made the second choice and not the first - some lucky combination of brain chemistry and parental support, who knows? But I can’t judge those who made the first choice and became bullies, because I saw the seeds of that in myself. I understand. I can’t advocate the behavior, and it should be stopped - but to demonize the bully does not solve the problem. There has to be compassion.
— AlexWhy are some kids bullied? Because if somebody is “out”, the others are the more “in” for it. You must not underestimate the power of sadism in building group spirit. It is pointless to look into the personality of victims to find clues for why they were picked. The role of victim is assigned arbitrarily. They were not suicidal before, but they are now.
It seems almost too good that bullies would be suicidal, as if there was some justice to life. I assumed they lived on happily, perfectly oblivious of or empowered by the damage they’d done.
Bullying seems to be different among boys and girls. With boys it’s physical, and they can learn Krav Maga. With girls it is more verbal. What are you supposed to do, drop your ladylike manner and evolve into the same kind of catty bitch?
— SusannaThere should be a zero tollerance for any bullying. Its the school’s fault. How do the poor victim’s get an education feeling so horrible that like many of the posters they have no sympathy for bullies who commit suicide?
The other students enjoy the bullying. But more times that I think we can imagine so do the teachers. And even when they don’t enjoy it, the teachers don’t want to put the effort in to stop it even though they could.
— BillI was bullied from my earliest days in elementary school at an exclusive private school until I persuaded my parents to let me go to public school after ninth grade. I think those bullies were a big factor in serious suicidal tendencies I had as a young adult.
I’m an old lady now, and leading a very happy life. If I heard one of my childhood tormentors had committed suicide, I’d have complicated feelings about it. I hope that sorrow and dismay at the waste and misery would be the largest part.
The main thing I want to say is: if your child is being bullied, take it seriously. I’ve been getting over this for most of my life, and I could have spent my time doing something better.
— Anne W.So, as a person who was bullied as a kid and who grew up to be a successful professional in a notoriously sharp-elbowed business (venture capital), I have what I hope are a few useful insights.
1. Any multi-actor system tends to organize itself, to at least some degree, around a hierarchy. This is true of markets and all mammalian social groups. Bullying is a sociopathic expression of an effort to move within a hierarchy, and it stands to reason that the normative “bully” is someone who lacks any better way of navigating the hierarchy. Since childhood is the time that we’re supposed to learn to do that navigation, it also seems fairly uncontroversial that people who have to resort to bullying (or, to put it another way, spend their time learning to bully in place of learning to advance themselves through positive, sustainable relationships) stand a high chance of being life’s losers. In that light, the connection makes sense — the don’t develop properly, don’t acquire the skills to succeed, and ultimately end up losers who are more likely to get depressed and off themselves.
2. #* (Beyond Bullied): Fighting back is probably an important part of the equation, but what leaped out at me about your story was that your son has supportive and engaged parents. I suspect that the fact that you were so committed to being your son’s ally was the most important dynamic on helping him move through what was clearly a difficult period. Certainly, helping a child distinguish between fighting as a self-defeating way to solve conflict and fighting as a legitimate form of self-defense is useful, but I have to believe that his sense of basic security was helped as much by the good parenting as by the self-defense, and it’s that basic sense of security that’s important. I know that my own experience was made more difficult by having a father who — for reasons of his own — had a big investment in blaming me rather than standing behind me. It took a lot longer for me to get over that pain than it did for me to de-personalize my treatment at the hands of those who bullied me (most of whom are losers. I’m running a VC firm… :-D).
3. Teachers and school administrators are poorly qualified to be cops (probably a good thing, when you think about the different things you want in a teacher and a cop). So I think that those of you who complain about the teachers are barking up the wrong tree. To me, it’s a law enforcement issue, and if you can’t get a criminal complaint issued (one would predict that the justice system would be reluctant to inject itself into schoolyard issues), there’s always the good old civil lawsuit. Restraining orders are VERY easy to get (judges don’t want to be responsible for a horrible outcome and so will typically issue them pretty readily), and one good way to get the attention of your local bully’s parents — who should be controlling their little brat — is to threaten their assets. That probably won’t restore things to normal, but if they’ve gotten that bad moving schools is probably in the cards anyway, and what you should be thinking about is dealing with a societal scourge if nothing else.
4. It’s definitely not fair to blame the victim, but it’s also probably true that if a kid is getting bullied regularly (and particularly if it’s happening in disparate circumstances), there’s something that needs to be looked at. The world doesn’t treat “different” people very well as a general rule, and if a kid has the blessing/curse of standing out in one way or another, s/he’s going to have to learn skills to mitigate the social consequences eventually, and the sooner the better. So if your kid is getting picked on as a matter of course, you need to work with them to help them embrace some of life’s less pleasant realities and find strategies to win nonetheless. The fact is, there are a lot of jerks out there, and if someone is going to go through life abnormally prone to attract them, s/he had best learn to deal with it — or perhaps moderate those jerk-attracting elements — as best s/he can. Life’s tough, and what’s most important is that kids be taught to thrive regardless of what the lottery throws at them.
My $.02….
— Anonymous for this oneAt school, I endured physical and verbal abuse every day, ignored or sanctioned by teachers. At home, I endured physical abuse from my sister and psychological abuse from my mother, with zero protection from my largely absent father.
I think you’ll understand why I disagree that “there has to be compassion” for bullies.
— perraWhy is this study a surprise to anyone? SS officers working at concentration camps suffered an astronomically high (but not high enough) suicide rate. Subjugation always has its side effects.
— J Frank Parnell#14 - Emily B.
Yes, sue the schools? That’s ridiculous. You’re trying to make school a better place by suing them? That’s such an unthoughtful and absurd statement. Most schools are straining under the financing their getting now and you just want to walk in and sue them. That’s such a typical response. Yeah, let’s take MORE money away from them and clog up the judicial system at the same time. Why don’t you sue the school board, the school district, the state in which you live in maybe even the companies that make the school supplies.
I’m sorry I rambled on there. I am just a little infuriated with your statement. Hopefully you were just kidding.
— Capt. Concernicus