BULLYING AND SUICIDE

The new school year is now well under way, and with it there is sadly the recurring concern of many parents—is my child being bullied? There is evidence that bullying carries serious consequences, including an increased risk of suicide

There is evidence that bullying carries serious consequences, including an increased risk of suicide. Every new school bring with it fears of whether children are being bullied at school.

The problem isn’t hard to find. Ask any group of high school students and you’ll likely hear what we heard. “Some people could just make fun of some other people and that’s sad,” says one high school student. “I hear a lot of people, they call kids faggots. And they use a lot of mean words. And ah, I see kids getting pushed around. And get things thrown at them. Stuff like that,” says another.

“A bunch of kids jump other people for like no reason just because they dislike them or whatever,” another student states. “They push them around and take their lunch money. They are not big enough to defend or they don’t defend themselves and because they are easy targets cause they are rich or something,” says yet another. “Because they are different and they just don’t like that they are different,” the first student adds.

The old saying about sticks and stones and how names don’t hurt couldn’t be further from the truth. The problem of bullying is distressingly common, and the after-effects, potentially devastating.

Research out of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry shows adolescents, in New York and other states, are at increased risk of suicidal thoughts and behavior if they are victims of school bullying. One in seven schoolchildren or approximately five million in the U.S. are affected as either bully or victim.
In a study of bullying, among both those bullied and even the bullies themselves, 43 percent had suicidal thoughts. Twelve percent actually committed some form of suicide attempt by eight months after follow-up.

Parents can look for the signs to intervene and prevent the consequences. Dr. Gilda Carle, a psychologist who specializes in bullying, says, “Parents have got to see the moods of their child, see if there are any changes in behaviors, check out how the child is adapting to his new school year and his grades and all the other things that go on.”

The most common types of bullying was exclusion, in other words, excluding someone from an activity or social group, then verbal abuse, physical abuse, and then coercion.
Interestingly, it’s the victim who is also a bully, the so called victim-perpetrator, who has a three and a half times risk for suicidal behavior…which is why it’s important for the problem to be identified for both victim and aggressor.

“Parents and kids have got to communicate. And that if this is a source of embarrassment for a child, it’s up to the parent to draw the child out and to get the child to express what is on his or her mind,” states Carle.