We’ve blogged about bullying several times in recent posts –
including looking at the impact
of peers on stemming bullying behavior and using
technology to reduce bullying. Unfortunately, the occurrence of bullying,
with one in
four students reporting being victims, is all too common itself. The importance of preventing such cruelty is
intuitive, but some recent
research has yielded data that highlights the
seriousness of this issue.
In an article published late last year in JAMA
Psychiatry, a team of researchers
from Finland and Israel looked back at data collected in 1989, when over 5,000
eight-year-olds in Finland were surveyed about their experiences, or lack
thereof, with bullying. The researchers
then looked at national health records to see if these same children went on to
receive treatment for psychiatric disorders when they were between the ages of
16 and 29 years old. They found that
being bullied when young correlated, after adjusting for other factors linked
to psychiatric risk, with nearly twice the risk of needing psychiatric
treatment later in life. It is also
interesting to note that most of the eight-year-olds who bullied others had
existing psychiatric symptoms at that time as well as later. This suggests that incidents of bullying
should be red flags for both the victims’ and the perpetrators’ need for help.
Photo credit: One Way Stock via flickr cc
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