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posted by cmn32480 on Monday May 04 2015, @01:33PM   Printer-friendly
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.

 
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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Monday May 04 2015, @10:04PM

    by GreatAuntAnesthesia (3275) on Monday May 04 2015, @10:04PM (#178812) Journal

    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.

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  • (Score: 2) by wisnoskij on Monday May 04 2015, @10:46PM

    by wisnoskij (5149) <reversethis-{moc ... ksonsiwnohtanoj}> on Monday May 04 2015, @10:46PM (#178829)

    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.