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from the won't-someone-think-of-the-children dept.
I found this recently-published article, Children who are bullied suffer worse long-term mental health problems than those who are maltreated interesting. Here are some excerpts:
A new study published in The Lancet Psychiatry shows that children who have been bullied by peers suffer worse in the longer term than those who have been maltreated by adults.
The research is led by Professor Dieter Wolke from Warwick's Department of Psychology and Warwick Medical School. The study is due to be presented at the Pediatric Academic Societies (PAS) annual meeting in San Diego on Tuesday 28 April.
[...] Professor Wolke said: "The mental health outcomes we were looking for included anxiety, depression or suicidal tendencies. Our results showed those who were bullied were more likely to suffer from mental health problems than those who were maltreated. Being both bullied and maltreated also increased the risk of overall mental health problems, anxiety and depression in both groups."
An abstract and full article (pdf) are available.
(Score: 5, Disagree) by wisnoskij on Monday May 04 2015, @02:33PM
Maybe they get bullied because they have serious chronic problems. They definitely are not picked at random, so you cannot treat all seriously bullied children as a random sample, so you cannot infer any statistically valid information from analyzing their lives and comparing them to the national average.
You might as well prove that cancer treatments kill people, because the average lifespan after receiving cancer treatment is substantially lower than the national average.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Ethanol-fueled on Monday May 04 2015, @03:15PM
Sometimes they are picked at random. And just as easily as something can go viral overnight, one unlucky person can be selected as a target and all the kids jump on the bandwagon and make fun of them because they wouldn't dare be on the "uncool" side of the harassment.
Few kids of young age have the maturity and courage to speak up and call it out for being a ridiculous mob mentality. Then along with the taunts come the rumors. And then the whole thing snowballs out of control until the school administration gets involved and punishments are meted out.
As a kid I saw this kind of thing happen many times, and this was when nobody I knew had the internet. Kids can be vicious bastards, sociopathic even.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Marand on Monday May 04 2015, @06:36PM
As a kid I saw this kind of thing happen many times, and this was when nobody I knew had the internet. Kids can be vicious bastards, sociopathic even.
Yep. Not old enough to have any fear of consequences or be appropriately subtle about their vindictiveness, kids often represent the worst parts of humanity. That should be the real message about Lord of the Flies when it gets discussed in school, not all the crap about allegory.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by tathra on Monday May 04 2015, @08:57PM
its not even really about courage and maturity. if you speak out against the mob, guess who becomes its immediate target. the only real solution is to not let the mob form in the first place, but how that's supposed to happen, i have no idea.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bradley13 on Monday May 04 2015, @03:21PM
Said like someone who hasn't been there.
Not picked at random, no. New kid in a class with established cliques? Shy? Poor social skills?
It doesn't take much, and then it becomes a vicious cycle. Once a kid has become a victim, he/she acts defensively in new situations. Which is like blood in the water for the bullies.
It's difficult to prove anything absolutely in the realm of human behavior. It's not mathematics. However, there is little doubt that bullying causes psychological damage. This article just confirms that peers have more power than adults.
Been there myself. Seen it happen to too many kids. Seen parents encourage there kids to be bullies. It's ugly...
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by btendrich on Monday May 04 2015, @04:33PM
"Not picked at random, no. New kid in a class with established cliques? Shy? Poor social skills?"
None of those are random... (The new kid may be random, but we're talking about the new kid's ability (or inability) to adapt into an established social setting, so again, not random...)
Bullies are like lions, they pick the 'weak' to go after. All this shows is that the bullies seem to pick their targets well. Better than adults.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by wisnoskij on Monday May 04 2015, @05:10PM
Even the "new kid" is far from random. It implies that their parent(s) are not settled and shuffle the kid around (while ignoring there need to have a settled life while static friends). I think we could find a lot of non random variables in what makes up a "new kid".
(Score: 3, Interesting) by wisnoskij on Monday May 04 2015, @09:03PM
This has been rebutted already, but I would like to take the time to thoroughly disprove this argument. Those are not random variables.
Poor social is linked to mental illness, and sometimes caused by it.
Shyess has been linked to a broad range of mental illness, that often start in childhood and progress into adulthood.
Being the "new kid" implies your parents moving you around. Which is linked to a number of bad things in latter life.
And one mentioned by many others Intelligence. Well that is highly highly linked to mental illness.
You seem to be making my point for me. Using your argument on how children are picked for bullying and using existing psychological studies on the effects and correlations of being shy, socially awkward, being moved around as a child, and of being smart provides us with a very good reason why this group of people would disproportionately suffer from mental illness; that does not require them to be treated any differently by bullies for them to get to be this way. Combining your argument with Occam's Razor provides very good evidence of why this statistical analysis is just pseudo science with no evidence to back up its conclusions.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Monday May 04 2015, @10:04PM
Couldn't your argument be flipped upside down? Shyness, intelligence etc are already known to be correlated to mental illness. Maybe it turns out that bullying (to which they are more prone) is the mechanism.
Until someone does a study picking apart the bullying from the "at risk" personality traits, we won't know for sure which one is driving.
(Score: 2) by wisnoskij on Monday May 04 2015, @10:46PM
Well at least for a few we are fairly certain they are the driving factors. The science of how intelligence and mental illness are genetically linked is pretty well universally accepted. And the mechanism through which metal illness causes shyness and poor social skills is often pretty simple and common sense. Yes statistically you are right, it could be either way, which is why I said this does not actually give us any solid evidence, not that this has been long disproven. But, we do have to also consider Occams Razor; As long as we have no direct evidence of the actions of this ternary party, if we can do away with this theory and still explain all the evidence, then it is better to do so without it. Sure, bullying is a mechanism through which metal illness could spread, no one has proven otherwise. But, this single study sure does not offer any direct evidence that it does so.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Tuesday May 05 2015, @09:17AM
Poor social skills is more likely to indicate a kid at the younger end of the age range for the grade. For example, the kid who's birthday is just before the cutoff age for the school year. You seem really motivated to blame mental illness. Feeling guilty about something?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by wisnoskij on Tuesday May 05 2015, @12:48PM
Sure, but there is a non insignificant number of people who have poor social skills (particularly when they are very pronounced) because of mental illness. We also see a lot of social skills out of the mentally gifted, who have signification higher risk of mental illness.
So the sample is not random, there will be more people with risk factors for mental illness than the general population. Not to mention that poor social skills can turn into mental illness all by themselves.
(Score: 1) by inertnet on Monday May 04 2015, @03:28PM
Even if you're right, that doesn't make bullying acceptable. On the contrary, this study shows that it should be even more unacceptable than previously thought.
(Score: 2) by wisnoskij on Monday May 04 2015, @03:31PM
You obviously are not paying attention. If I am right, note: I am, Then we have zero evidence that bullying is bad for the bullied. We might as well assume that the are living happier fuller lives because of being bullied then they would without.
(Score: 1) by inertnet on Monday May 04 2015, @03:58PM
Sure, you must be right. Let's make it official, bullying is good for kids. One thing is obvious though, you were never bullied. Your sig implies the opposite.
(Score: 2) by wisnoskij on Monday May 04 2015, @04:11PM
My sig implies I like South Park, nothing more.
That said, I am not aware of of ever being bullied in highschool, but I was too shy to be aware of what was even going on around me most of the time and ran between classes like my life depended on it, so I have never been able to figure out if that was because I just did not notice it or that is never existed.
(Score: 1) by inertnet on Monday May 04 2015, @04:55PM
I wasn't aware of the South Park reference. When my son was bullied I went to the school to have something done about it, all I got was that the the bully deserved a second chance...
Because I'm an introvert as well, some kids tried to bully me in primary school, until I got fed up and defended myself. It usually only took one punch to stop them for good.
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Monday May 04 2015, @05:56PM
...all I got was that the the bully deserved a second chance
Of course. They always get a second chance, and a third, and a fourth, because the teachers can't do much about it and their parents f***ing don't care.
I remember picking my son up from school one day after school. We were standing in front of the school with other parents and kids, while I was talking to another parent. One of the class bullies kicked my son, hard enough to knock him down. (They were maybe 9 or 10 years old.) The mother was standing right there, pretending she hadn't noticed anything. I said "your son just kicked my kid" and waited. She asked her son "did you?"? He put his hands over his ears and started babbling to make sure he couldn't hear anything else she might say. So she shrugs and walks off. That's it, no consequences for the kid, no apology, nothing.
Bringing up correlation and causation is, sorry, kind of naive. Sure, it's impossible to prove to a mathematical standard, because we can't really run randomized, double-blind studies on kids' lives. But I have lots of anecdotes like the above, as do many other people. Eventually, anecdotes do accumulate into something resembling evidence, as we watch previously happy kids withdraw into depression, despite anything we can do to help them.
That all said, it's not actually the bullies who are at fault. Kids are fundamentally uncivilized creatures [wikipedia.org]. It's primarily a failing of their parents, who can't be bothered to civilize them. Heck, in some cases the parents actively encourage the bullying: "look how tough my kid is - he's beating that other kid up". To a lesser extent, it's a failing of the schools - teachers could do more, but they often don't want to get involved, or they aren't allowed to get involved for political reasons.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by btendrich on Monday May 04 2015, @04:40PM
I was bullied. In elementary school and again in middle school, by different groups for different reasons. It made me realize that you have to give a shit what they think/say for them to have any power over you. Except when one of them (once) tried to make it physical. Then I broke the kids face with a lunch tray. Got a lot of crap for "not fighting fair" and all that. But hey, what the hell do I care what they think is fair, right? I would argue that some level of bullying/confrontation is a good thing in life, your kids aren't going to live in a bubble forever.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by gnuman on Monday May 04 2015, @03:39PM
Maybe they get bullied because they have serious chronic problems.
Kids get picked on for variety of reasons, including not belonging to one "popular group" or another, or being new kid in class, or different haircut or maybe crooked tooth or different way they say their name than local dialect.. Or maybe playing "wrong instrument" in band? Are these "serious chronic problems" to you??
I'm sorry but your entire statement is utter bullshit. You undermine victims of bullying at the same time as you undermine statistics - maybe you simply don't understand either.
(Score: 2) by wisnoskij on Monday May 04 2015, @03:49PM
So we might as well say not belonging to a "popular group" or having a weird haircut Causes long term mental health problems, either is as valid as eachother when we do not control for alternative variables in our experiments.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 05 2015, @01:12AM
Maybe they get bullied because they have serious chronic problems
"Maybe" is a word that you may have missed. Outliers can skew the findings and it is quite possible that kids with serious problems get bullied more often than a normal distribution.
They definitely are not picked at random
Do you disagree with this statement? Kids may be bullied for trivial reasons, like you mention, but I would bet that there is an overrepresentation of overweight, underweight, too short, too tall, big boobs, small boobs, speech disorders, too smart, too stupid, etc.
(Score: 2) by gnuman on Wednesday May 06 2015, @04:18PM
So you are saying, serious chronic problems === "overweight, underweight, too short, too tall, big boobs, small boobs, speech disorders, too smart, too stupid, etc." ???
Too smart is serious chronic problem? Or too short is a serious chronic problem?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Marand on Monday May 04 2015, @04:17PM
Maybe they get bullied because they have serious chronic problems. They definitely are not picked at random
Sure, "serious chronic problems". Like consistently like having higher marks on test and report cards because even as kids, crab mentality [wikipedia.org] is a problem, even before we're old enough to really understand and identify the concept. You get encouraged to do well in school by family and teachers, but then when you do, you get assaulted by a subset of your peers for it.
You don't even have to brag or be smug about it to get targeted, because the teachers do things to encourage better performance, and the other kids aren't complete idiots: they see and remember the ones that get rewarded often, and some of them will punish you for standing out[1]. Even when it isn't outright violence, you can get picked on, ostracised, and harassed just for not deliberately failing tests to lower your grades. This something of a catch-22, because in some families (not mine, thankfully), poor performance in school might result in harsh treatment from parents.
I caught a lot of shit when I was in school for having high grades, and even more when I wouldn't let the people harassing me cheat. Never understood that logic; someone spends the day being a jackass to me and then I'm supposed to start giving them test answers and put my neck on the line for disciplinary action? Nope, fuck off. It also didn't help that kids thought I had a 'funny accent' and assumed I was new in the area. I couldn't have been a bigger target even if I'd painted a bulls-eye on my chest and walked around with a kick-me sign on my back.
I still had some friends, but I mostly spent my school years as an introverted loner because the poor treatment I received led to me not trusting other kids. Especially after a few incidents that started with faux sincerity; I didn't even really trust the friends I had, because I always wondered if it was sincere or if they were playing some kind of bullying long game[2]. It got better, though. I'm still cynical of people's motives even today, but not nearly as badly as I used to be. I'm a stubborn enough person that the bullying led to me being more self-confident just to spite the people giving me shit. If not for that and family support, I'd probably be in that "anxiety and depression" group.
Doesn't mean I don't still harbour some bitterness, though; I moved away and I'm happy I'll probably never run into any of them again. I think moving helped a lot toward getting over it, actually, because I no longer randomly encounter old school jackasses that act like we're best friends now that they don't have peers to impress by bullying.
[1] Not that bullies even need that much of a reason. I remember a girl in high school that went around punching guys for no reason other than a belief that she could do it without retaliation. She'd even tell people "you can't hit me back, I'm a girl" while doing it, and teachers ignored it because apparently lacking a penis equals diplomatic immunity.
[2] This wasn't just paranoia on my part; it had actually happened before with a "friend" that turned on me thinking it would put him in the good graces of the bully group. It didn't.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Marand on Monday May 04 2015, @04:32PM
[1] Not that bullies even need that much of a reason. I remember a girl in high school that went around punching guys for no reason other than a belief that she could do it without retaliation. She'd even tell people "you can't hit me back, I'm a girl" while doing it, and teachers ignored it because apparently lacking a penis equals diplomatic immunity.
I should add, though it's veering off-topic a bit, that the worst part about this was that she was right. Nobody would retaliate because we'd all had "never hit girls" drilled into us and enforced by the teachers, so even the asshole bullies wouldn't hit her back.
Eventually, when she tried it on me, all I did was grab her arm to stop the punch and give it a twist, doing a basic takedown I'd learned before that didn't cause any harm, and I got in trouble for it. Not her for punching with full force, no. I did for non-violent self defense with witnesses.
Moral of the story: sometimes the teachers are part of the problem.
(Score: 2) by wisnoskij on Monday May 04 2015, @05:15PM
While you might disagree with my one example, you definitely do not contradict my statement. You were bullied, and believe that it made you a better "more confident" person.
From my perspective bullying sure seems to be largely a innate programmed activity. Now, this would be implied to have some positive effect on reproduction of the group. The simplest and easiest to understand reason for bullying would likely to be as a team building exercise. To promote togetherness, to encourage the encourage-able, and possibly weed out the useless. We definitely see some bullying of siblings in nature (ie birds) where the purpose is to kill off the weak and to let the able flourish. Now I think it is important to point out this has perhaps too much of a Darwinian implication to this. I don't think it is entirely fair to say they fight it out until one is a champion on a hill of the dead. When there is not enough food, and a one's sibling is dying some species have a mechanism in which they can save themselves by slightly speeding up the death of a sibling. But I think the other option is far more interesting, Hazing has always been a core component of team building. And having to prove your commitment to a group has been the core of human communities for hundreds of thousands of years before he term hazing was invented. Though I do not think it is fair to label it so one sided, I think there is definitely some psychology there that makes the hazie become more committed and perhaps even a better person.
So above and beyond the statistics just obviously being unprovable, I think there is reason to believe that people are targeted for bullying for specific reasons. And it is not some sort of Darwinian urge that just encourages random conflict that proposes to improve the group by randomly killing off members.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Marand on Monday May 04 2015, @06:25PM
While you might disagree with my one example, you definitely do not contradict my statement. You were bullied, and believe that it made you a better "more confident" person.
You didn't make that statement at all. Your statement was that bullied people have "serious chronic problems" and "are not picked at random", claiming that it invalidates any random sampling. You said nothing nothing about long-term effects themselves, and definitely didn't make any claim that bullying is a net-positive behaviour that brings out better traits in people.
So, no, I wasn't attempting to contradict your nonexistent statement about bullying improving people. Maybe you said it elsewhere, but I didn't reply to those, and I haven't even read them all. There's too much "I need to be right so I'm going to reply and argue with every response" floating around in this thread for me to have any desire to read through all of it.
Hell, I'm not sure I'd fit that assertion even if you'd actually made it in the comment I responded to, though. I may be confident in spite of the bullying, but mostly that was regaining confidence after losing most of it to bullying. I also, as I said, never got over the cynicism from it, and even today I'm wary of good deeds or assistance from people because I assume they want something or will use it against me later.
Sure, you could say it taught me something about survival, but I wouldn't say bullying made me a "better person".
Doesn't matter, though. I was pointing out that bullying happens for all sorts of reasons, including no reason at all. All it takes is one person that, for whatever reason, derives pleasure from hurting people and a handful of cowardly types that think siding with that person will avoid his wrath, and you've got a perfect setup for bullying without needing any logic for the targets beyond "they aren't us, so they're fair game".
One of the worst bully groups I ever dealt with was this type. They had their little bully clique with one sociopath-in-training leader and a bunch of cowardly guys that latched on to him for strength in numbers and immunity from his targeting. It was one of the few times bullying got physical for me; I'd gotten cornered and was about to receive a beatdown, so I grabbed the smallest of the group and slung him into a wall so I had an opening to get away. I knew enough to fight, but I was outnumbered and not particularly strong, so if he hadn't been tiny (the "short guy with huge attitude" cliché type) I would have been stuck. Thing is, most of the group were cowards at heart, and they all backed off of me after that except for their little alpha-male leader. He kept harassing me even after that, but none of his lapdogs would any more. The one I introduced to the wall was even friendly to me when his pals weren't around to see.
Which I guess goes back to what I was talking about in the other comment: sometimes bullying happens because it's the bully that's flawed or insecure. Rather than being some instinct to cull the weak, it can just as easily be a way to try proving that you're the alpha, or to improve your standing in a group by belittling others. You see that sort of behaviour in workplace all the time, probably from the same sorts of people. Unable to excel on their own, they try try to cut down others any way possible so that they don't stand out as the weak link.
(Score: 2) by wisnoskij on Monday May 04 2015, @08:44PM
I did not mean to imply that I had made a statement about it improving people. Just that the sampling is non-random. Some people will be bullied and grow up fine others will have a higher chance of being bullied because they have psychological problems and they will skew the results.
On a side note. Bullies aren't Alpha, bullies are betas who want to be Alphas. Violence is tool of the non-dominant, the people with an insecure status in the group. Studied have shown higher Testosterone in the popular, friendly, smart people than the bullies or their victims.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Monday May 04 2015, @09:30PM
On a side note. Bullies aren't Alpha, bullies are betas who want to be Alphas. Violence is tool of the non-dominant, the people with an insecure status in the group. Studied have shown higher Testosterone in the popular, friendly, smart people than the bullies or their victims.
Oh, I wasn't meaning it like that. I just meant he was the leader/alpha of their bully clique, and they were subordinate to him. Suggesting that they were acting like a pack of animals within a group of otherwise civil human beings, basically.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Tuesday May 05 2015, @07:09PM
In my observation, you are correct. Alphas do not fight or bully; they're completely socially secure and have no need to fight (not even with each other). Betas do not attack alphas. Only betas fight, and only with other betas, and in a fight, the socially-lower individual always loses. Betas come in a range from tough-guys always looking for trouble to a bottom-end type who snipe from a safe distance. Meanwhile gammas (who are ignored by all or, rarely, beat up by an overbearing beta since a gamma will not fight back) go "wha'happened??"
In dogs, these social statuses are born (genetic), not made, and nothing you can do will change them.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 04 2015, @04:46PM
Maybe they get bullied because they have serious chronic problems. They definitely are not picked at random
This is phrased poorly, but it does have a kernel of truth to it. I'd respond to each individual rebuttal, but there are so many that I'm just replying to the original post.
Sometimes the bullied are effectively picked at random (e.g. parents moved for a job, happen to have tripped in a particularly public and embarrassing way one day), and sometimes they are due to a reason (e.g. a genetic defect resulting in a glandular problem resulting in morbid obesity). I'm sure everybody will agree that at least some victims of bullying were bullied for a reason, even if we can't support or condone it.
As such, any study assuming a fully randomized population is questionable. There is every reason to think at least some of this is reverse causation which would need to be accounted for in the analysis. Or do people here really think that children who are clinically psychotic due to physiological imbalances have the exact same probability of being bullied as the general population.
(Score: 2) by Whoever on Monday May 04 2015, @07:15PM
And how do you know with such certainty how "they" were picked?
On this and other message boards, I have seen similar victim blaming when discussing bullying. I assume that the person blaming the victims was him/herself a bully at school.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 05 2015, @01:05PM
Well, victim-blaming is a conservative tradition. Apparently suffering because of other people's actions, whether from being bullied or raped or mugged, is a sign of moral weakness or something, plus White Jesus says the fact that it happened proves that you deserved it. Blaming the victim doesn't necessarily mean the blamer would do the action themselves, just that they're a sociopath.