From The Dallas Morning News: http://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/latest-columns/20130226-emily-bazelon-bullyings-lasting-impact.ece
Emily Bazelon
26 February 2013
A significant new study from Duke provides the best evidence we’ve had thus far that bullying in childhood is linked to a higher risk of psychological disorders in adulthood. The results came as a surprise to the research team. “I was a skeptic going into this,” author and Duke psychiatry professor William Copeland said about the claim that bullying does measurable long-term psychological harm. “To be honest, I was completely surprised by the strength of the findings.”
I’m less surprised, because as I explain in my new book about bullying, Sticks and Stones, earlier research has shown that bullying increases the risk for many problems, including low academic performance in school and depression (for both bullies and victims) and criminal activity later in life (for bullies). But the Duke study is important because it lasted 20 years and followed 1,270 children into adulthood. Beginning at the ages of 9, 11 and 13, the kids were interviewed annually until the age of 16, along with their parents, and then multiple times over the years following.
Based on the findings, Copeland and his team divided their subjects into three groups: people who were victims as children, people who were bullies and people who were both. The third group is known as bully-victims. These are the people who tend to have the most serious psychological problems as kids, and in the Duke study, they also showed up with higher levels of anxiety, depressive disorders and suicidal thinking as adults. The people who had only experienced being victims were also at heightened risk for depression and anxiety. And the bullies were more likely to have an antisocial personality disorder.
The researchers also checked to see if the variation could be attributed to differences in socioeconomic status, or family dysfunction/instability, or maltreatment (which they defined as physical or sexual abuse). All three groups had higher rates of family hardship than the kids who didn’t experience bullying. For the victims, the risk of anxiety disorders remained strong even when taking into account family problems, though the risk of depression did not. For bully-victims, the risk of both anxiety and depression held, and for bullies, the risk of antisocial personality disorder did as well. In other words, these results suggest that bullying scars people whether they grow up in a home with two functional parents or with frequent arguing, not much parental supervision, divorce, separation or downright abuse or neglect. It’s a finding that’s in line with other work.
Continue reading at: http://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/latest-columns/20130226-emily-bazelon-bullyings-lasting-impact.ece
