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Written by Jay Rath, Contributing writer
May 5, 2011
The impact of childhood bullying can last long into adulthood. For example, just look at Great Britain’s new princess, Kate Middleton.
“One of the wedding presents they wanted was for donations to charity, and one of the major charities they wanted donations for is called Beatbullying,” says Dr. Thomas Wright, chief medical officer for the Rockford, Ill.-based Rosecrance Health Network. “That’s because Kate was bullied as a youngster, because she was skinny and very pale.”
It’s bad enough when you’re a kid, but adults may continue to suffer the effects of childhood bullying years or decades later, leading to clinical depression, anxiety and substance abuse.
“A lot of people think that bullying is just part of growing up, that it’s sort of something kids will work out,” Wright says. “Sometimes that happens. Oftentimes it doesn’t, and it ends up being a chronic trauma issue. It has pretty serious consequences down the line.”
For members of the LGBT community, adolescent bullying can lead to self-loathing. “It makes what already is a difficult sexual developmental process in adolescence that much more difficult,” Wright says.
According to Mental Health America, a nonprofit advocacy organization, U.S. teens hear slurs such as “homo,” “faggot” and “sissy” about 26 times a day or once every 14 minutes. One study found that 31 percent of gay youth had been threatened or injured at school in the last year alone. As a result, LGBT students are more likely to skip school due to fear, threats and property vandalism.
In the wake of several high-profile cases of suicide by young people who were the targets of bullying, parents, educators and behavioral health professionals have turned their attention to the effects, interventions, treatment and support for those who are affected.
Wright and other health professionals addressed the growing crisis at “Peeling Back the Layers of Bullying,” a day-long workshop held April 29 at Lussier Family Heritage Center in Madison. The workshop featured sessions led by clinical staff from Madison’s Connections Counseling and Rosecrance, both of which treat individuals with substance abuse and mental health disorders.
Topics included “Bullying: A Crisis in Mental Health.” “Cyber Attack: Bullying and Social Media,” “Growing Pains: Healthy Ways of Coping with Stress and Anxiety as an Emerging Adult” and “Creating Connections: Mentoring and Peer Support.” About 30 healthcare professionals from Madison, Milwaukee and Rockford attended.
According to Mental Health America, 22 percent of gay students skipped school in the past month because they felt unsafe; 28 percent drop out – more than three times the national average.
But bullying doesn’t end with adulthood. Wright, a child and adolescent psychiatrist who lives in the Madison area, identifies three general forms of bullying that can occur throughout life.
Direct bullying is obvious. Indirect bullying is subtler. “It’s where the bully sabotages those around you – to you,” he says. “They talk badly to coworkers about you, but they won’t do it to your face. They might plant rumors about you. They might imply that you’re not a good worker. They sabotage your ability to succeed. A lot of times, victims don’t even know where the source is.”
Finally, there’s bullying of exclusion. “People are left out of social groups or social situations that they really ought to be included in, but they’re left out to lower that person’s self-esteem,” Wright says. “That certainly is a kind (of bullying) that happens with adults in the workplace.”
For both adults and children, bullying is an equal-opportunity problem, Wright says. There are no special identifiers for potential victims.
“It happens across the board,” he says. Still, there are some characteristics that many victims share. “They tend to be a little more socially withdrawn, more sensitive, maybe quieter or passive.”
Bullying was not studied much before 2005, when the rise of cyber bullying attracted attention. Current studies are just beginning to examine long-term effects, but depression and anxiety already have been identified, sometimes leading to suicide and self-injury, or “cutting.” Bullying can also be a contributing factor in alcohol and drug addiction, as victims attempt to self-medicate.
“Whatever psychological processes are still going on in your own head about self-esteem, your own self-worth, it can really be helpful to look at that as an adult, about what happened to you as a child,” he says. “It is important to look at it throughout the cycle. Part of the problem is that we want to ignore it: ‘That’s something I went through. That’s just something kids do, I don’t want to go through that again.’ Awareness doesn’t happen once we put our heads in the sand.”
There’s at least one other tragic reason to look at the effects of bullying.
“Interesting enough, there are about 10 to 20 percent of victims who turn into bullies themselves,” Wright says. “That contributes to the cycle of it.”
