Childhood bullying is a burden for adult well-being
On bullying, part 2: Learning from recent research
Before digging into the connections I’m beginning to discern between my own experiences of being bullied in middle school and the man I am today, I want to pause, take a step back, and dig into what researchers are learning about whether and how experiences of being bullied in adolescence impact the mental health and social connectedness of people later on, during their subsequent adult lives.
This is important because, simply put, I need to ask: is my intuition about such a connection in my own life reasonable? Or is it just me?
Some definitions
First, let’s clarify some of the keywords and concepts that researchers and mental health professionals use to understand what bullying is, who’s involved, and how it might impact people’s future lives.
What is bullying?
People who devote themselves to understanding and helping people heal from bullying often distinguish between several kinds of bullying:
Direct bullying involves threats (e.g., of physical violence or property destruction) and actual violence. Thomas Paul Tarshis, a psychiatrist and public health professional whose work is focused on the mental health needs of children and youth, notes that “the threat of violence is a more common form of bullying than actual violence,” and that threats “can range from mild to extreme.”1
Indirect bullying involves acts like exclusion (“there are few events in your life that can have so profound an impact as losing your group of friends,” Tarshis writes); overt teasing; and spreading rumors. Rumor-spreading differs from other indirect methods of bullying, because a bully can act anonymously behind someone’s back while spreading false or demeaning rumors among peers.2
Cyberbullying, which is technologically-mediated, may be either direct or indirect in its content, but its form is distinct. That’s because, as Tarshis writes, cyberbullying “takes away the face-to-face aspect of bullying,” and may include such acts as identity theft or the construction of false or parody identities, abuse in social media posts or comments that can be viewed widely and “piled on” by others, or the sharing of degrading, embarrassing, or doctored images or videos on the internet or among the devices of many people.3 (As a personal aside, I’m grateful that cyberbullying didn’t yet exist when I was a kid, given how it enables an act of bullying to reach its victim within the privacy of their own home.)
Who’s involved (or not)?
Researchers and mental-health providers also make a some key distinctions regarding who is involved (or not) in bullying.
Bullies are those who inflict abuse on others.
Victims are those who are abused.
Bully-victims are those who both abuse and are abused by others. In other words, they are both perpetrators and recipients of abuse, depending on the context. As Tarshis notes, these are people who may have “learned the bullying behavior from being tormented themselves”—and sadly, they often “face the most severe mental health consequences.”4
Bystanders are those who witness abuse but do not intervene.
In addition, researchers who investigate the mental health and other outcomes of bullying often refer to non-involved or uninvolved people: those who were never bullied and never bullied anyone else. This is a category that researchers use to better understand how bullying impacts people. For example, in order to find out whether bullies, victims, or bully-victims have higher rates of mental health problems as they get older, a researcher can compare those rates with the baseline rate experienced by non-involved people. If those rates differ from the baseline in a meaningful way that doesn’t seem to be merely random, and if those differences persist after the researcher does their best to take into account other possible causes, then the researcher can point to an possible relationship worth investigating further, fleshing out, and potentially—as evidence mounts—addressing through better policy and informed action.
What recent research says about childhood bullying and adult well-being
Researchers and mental health providers know quite a lot about the consequences of bullying on the health of youth during their school years. As Tarshis notes, kids who are bullied are “more likely to experience headaches, stomachaches, and other physical symptoms,” tend to “perform worse in school,” and experience “higher rates of depression, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts.” At its worst, bullying can also lead to “completed suicides and violence in school.”5
Researchers and educators also know that adolescence is a vital formative stage in the development of students’ identities, interests, and dispositions. In fact, several decades of middle-grade school reform efforts in the United States have been spurred by the need to better match the structure and goals of schools with the needs of adolescents with respect to not only academic growth, but also social connectedness, the formation of healthy self-concepts, and the exploration of burgeoning interests.6 This aspect of how middle-grade schools are organized is usually called “developmental responsiveness.” In addition, there’s growing recognition that middle-grade schools must pay attention and respond early to behavior and attendance problems, because these often portend negative outcomes in high school.7
(Biographical side-note: The Carnegie Corporation’s 1989 Turning Points report—which advocated for, among other things, the formation of smaller learning communities in middle-grade schools to foster deeper connections between teachers and students, as well as policy measures to ensure that middle-grade teachers have a deep understanding of the developmental needs of adolescents8—was published in 1989, at the same time as I was being bullied in my own middle school. Later, in my former professional life in education non-profits, I helped conduct some major research projects and wrote a number of policy reports about educational practice and reform in the middle grades. But only recently, as my own memories of being bullied in adolescence began coming back to the fore of consciousness, did I begin to see how my own story fits into the historical context of efforts to clarify the goals and organization of middle-grade schools.)
But how does bullying victimization in adolescence impact the mental health and wellness of the bullied in adulthood, if at all, and how long? Over the past decade, some researchers have been drawing a clearer picture, using data that follow the same individuals from youth into adulthood, including information about their experiences of bullying in adolescence and their mental health and social functioning as adults.
Correlations with well-being in young-adulthood (mid-20’s)
First, let’s talk about how bullying experienced in youth might impact people’s lives as they reach their mid-20’s.
A suite of related studies by William E. Copeland and colleagues, published between 2013 and 2015, draws on data from the Great Smoky Mountains Study in Western North Carolina in the United States. The data include information about people’s experiences of bullying between the ages of 9–16 years old and their subsequent mental health as they entered their 20’s, up to 24–26 years old.
The researchers’ findings are startling. Even after taking into account factors like family hardships and psychiatric problems experienced in youth, victims of bullying were more likely to suffer from anxiety and panic disorders in early adulthood, compared with people were were not involved in bullying, and bully-victims were more likely to suffer from depression and panic disorders. Moreover, male bully-victims had 18.5 times higher odds of suicidality, and female bully-victims had 26.7 times higher odds of suffering from agoraphobia.9
The same group of researchers (including Copeland) analyzed data from both the U.S. Great Smoky Mountains Study and the U.K. Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children, in order to investigate how the lasting burden of adolescent bullying on young-adult well-being might compare with the burden of experiencing maltreatment in youth at the hands of adults.
“When being bullied was directly compared with maltreatment in childhood,” the authors wrote, “being bullied by peers had more adverse effects on early or young adult overall mental health.” And “whether or not they had a history of maltreatment by adults,” the authors found, people who were bullied in childhood had an “increased risk of young adult mental health problems such as anxiety, depression, and self-harm or suicidality.”10
Research from Norway provides more evidence. Using data from the longitudinal Youth and Mental Health Study of mid-Norway, Johannes Foss Sigurdson and colleagues investigated whether there was any correlation between “between bullying experiences at 14–15 years [old] and mental health problems and psychosocial functioning in young adulthood at 27 years [old].”11
Sigurdson and company found that everyone who had been involved in bullying in adolescence—whether as bully, victim, or bully-victim—had a “four- to eight-fold higher risk of being hospitalized due to mental health problems,” compared with people with no bullying involvement.12 And people who had been bullied were at greater risk for depression, their depression tended be more pervasive (i.e., more depressive symptoms), and they were “significantly more likely . . . to have been receiving mental health services earlier in life and in the last year.”13
Correlations with well-being in middle-adulthood (40’s, 50’s)
What about people in their “middle age,” like me? Is there evidence that bullying experienced in adolescence might still be a burden on mental health and quality of life in middle adulthood? Or do the correlations that researchers discern in young adulthood wash out and disappear by mid-life?
As it turns out, important correlations between childhood bullying victimization and decreased mental health and social wellness persist well into mid-life, according to studies conducted in the U.K. by Ryu Takizawa and colleagues. The data come from the British National Child Development Study, a 50-year longitudinal study that follows people born during a single week in 1958.
Using these data, Takizawa and colleagues were able to test whether being bullied at ages 7 and 11 correlated with psychological distress and cognitive functioning at age 50, and with psychiatric diagnoses at age 45. The researchers were also able to investigate correlations with social connectedness, socioeconomic status, and satisfaction with life at age 50.14
(This is, frankly, an amazing thing to be able to do. The younger version of me, who got a Ph.D. in Education and worked in nonprofits and on major research projects, is currently jumping up and down on his chair and crying out, “Holy shit!”)
Sadly—but not surprisingly, if you’re a mid-life person like me who still carries around unhealed bullying trauma from adolescence—the researchers found a hornet’s nest of worrying correlations between childhood bullying victimization and worse quality of life at mid-life. For example, compared with their non-victimized peers:
People who had been bullied were more like to suffer psychological distress, tended to have fewer social relationships (such as living with a parter or having social support when sick in bed), had lower rates of academic qualifications, and reported less satisfaction with their quality of life at age 50.
Moreover, people who had been bullied frequently suffered from higher rates of depression, anxiety disorders, and suicidality at age 45.
The authors went on the observe that “the longitudinal associations between bullying victimization and adult outcomes were similar to those of placement in public or substitute care or exposure to multiple adversities within the family.”15
Though not all of these many correlations were vast in magnitude after taking other potential variables into account, they were persistent and pervasive. They also have big implications for the public. As the authors note, bullying victimization in childhood was depressingly common among the people in the study: “just over one-quarter of children (28%) had been exposed to occasional bullying and 15% had been frequently bullied.”16 And as the researchers (including Takizawa) found in a subsequent analysis, bullying victimization also turned out to be associated with using mental health services from age 16 and up to age 50, whether persistently from childhood or beginning in adulthood.17 In other words, a lot of resources may get tied up in healing wounds from adolescence, even many years later.
What I make of this
It’s not just me, and there’s good reason for me to consider seriously the connections I’m beginning to discern between my experiences of being bullied in adolescence and my patterns of disposition and action in the present, as a 45-year-old man. This will be the focus of my next essay.
For now, I want to make an observation about all those research findings and what they mean for understanding our experiences as individual people.
It’s easy to feel drowned in all those data and correlations, even overcome by them. Even though good researchers work hard to be modest in how they understand and express their own findings, when you spend enough time reading about “risk factors” and “associations” and apparent “effects,” it’s tempting to feel doomed by circumstance.
But correlation is not destiny, and no individual life is a mere instantiation of any aggregate pattern. Such patterns are messy and partial, and so are we. Each of us is simply a person, a tangle of tendencies and dispositions, hopes and fears, decisions undertaken and experiences undergone, grounded in the past and geared toward the future. A correlation, if discerned with great care, is a calling for each of us, and all of us, to take responsibility for the world we create through our being together, and a promise of many untold stories worth understanding.
So, let’s close with the body and its stories. For though we live only in the present moment, we do so through bodies that past experience has shaped and honed, in ways both empowering and disempowering. As Lama Rod Owens writes in the passage with which I began this series of essays:
The body is significant, because unlike our mind, the body is always in the present. It does not have our mind’s ability to be in the past or future, and when we are really fortunate, to be here in the present. It does not get distracted. Despite all of this, the body can still be confused. When I say confused, I mean that experiences of trauma can disrupt how our bodies can be in tune with the things happening around us. Trauma disrupts the body’s equilibrium.18
Back to that, and to the connections that I’m discerning between my own past and present, next time.
Thomas Paul Tarshis, Living with Peer Pressure and Bullying, New York, NY: Checkmark Books, 2010, pg. 63.
Ibid., pgs. 64–65.
Ibid., pg. 121.
Ibid., pg. 61.
Ibid., pg. 60.
See, for example:
Association for Middle Level Education, The Successful Middle School: This We Believe, Columbus, OH: 2020.
Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development, Turning Points: Preparing American Youth For the 21st Century, New York, NY: Carnegie Corporation of New York, 1989.
Jaana Juvonen, et al., Focus On the Wonder Years: Challenges Facing the American Middle School, prepared for the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2004.
Valerie E. Lee, et al., Social Support, Academic Press, and Student Achievement: A View From the Middle Grades in Chicago. Chicago, IL: Chicago Annenberg Research Project, 1999.
The National Forum to Accelerate Middle Grades Reform, Schools To Watch Self-Study and Rating Rubric, Greenville, SC: revised September 2018.
See, for example:
Robert Balfanz & Vaughan Byrnes, “Closing the Mathematics Achievement Gap In High-Poverty Middle School: Enablers and Constraints,” Journal of Education for Students Placed at Risk, 2006; 11(2): pgs. 143–159.
Robert Balfanz, et al., “Preventing Student Disengagement and Keeping Students On the Graduation Path In Urban Middle Grades Schools: Early Identification and Effective Interventions,” Educational Psychologist, 2007; 42(4): pgs. 223–235.
Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development, Turning Points: Preparing American Youth For the 21st Century, New York, Carnegie Corporation of New York, 1989.
William E. Copeland, et al., “Adult Psychiatric Outcomes of Bullying and Being Bullied by Peers in Childhood and Adolescence,” JAMA Psychiatry, 2013; 70(4): pgs. 419–426.
Suzet Tanya Lereya, et al., “Adult mental health consequences of peer bullying and maltreatment in childhood: two cohorts in two countries,” Lancet Psychiatry, 2015; 2: pg. 529.
Johannes Foss Sigurdson, et al., “The long-term effects of being bullied or a bully in adolescence on externalizing and internalizing mental health problems in adulthood,” Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Mental Health, 2015; 9(42): pg. 9 of 13.
Ibid., pg. 8 of 13.
Ibid., pg. 10 of 13.
Ryu Takizawa, et al., “Adult Health Outcomes of Childhood Bullying Victimization: Evidence From a Five-Decade Longitudinal British Birth Cohort,” American Journal of Psychiatry, 2014; 171: pgs. 777–784.
Ibid., pg. 781.
Ibid., pg. 779.
Sara Evans-Lacko, et al., “Childhood bullying victimization is associated with use of mental health services over five decades: a longitudinal nationally representative cohort study,” Psychological Medicine, 2017; 47: pgs. 127–135.
Lama Rod Owens, Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation Through Anger, Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2020, pg. 127.