There seems to be an aversion in much of the scientific and behavioral health community to make the link to bullying and suicide, despite numerous news media accounts of children who said they felt so victimized by bullying that they did, in fact, commit suicide.
This is to be expected among scientists, who like to be absolutely sure before they reach a conclusion.
Nevertheless, there is evidence that bullying can lead to suicide.
The major study of this subject was done in 2008 by the Yale School of Medicine. It concluded that “bullying victims were two to nine times more likely to report suicidal thoughts than other children were,” and that the bullies themselves “also have an increased risk for suicidal behaviors.”
A 2014 analysis of scientific literature done by three doctors and published in JAMA Pediatrics said “this meta-analysis establishes that peer victimization is a risk factor of suicidal ideation and suicide attempts.”
The researchers found 34 reliable studies that covered peer bullying and suicide; the studies included data on 284,375 kids aged 9 to 21.
Results of the survey: kids being bullied were 2.23 times as likely to have suicidal ideations as those who were not bullied.
By delving deeper, they found that cyberbullying was more likely to lead to suicidal thoughts (raises the risk factor by a factor of 3.12) than the traditional, in-person abuse (increases the risk for suicidal ideation by a factor of 2.16).
“This might be because with cyberbullying, victims may feel they’ve been denigrated in front of a wider audience,” one doctor, Mitch van Geel said, and “material can be stored online, which may cause victims to relive the denigrating experience more often.”
In 2012, an article in Journal of Adolescent Health said, “Involvement in bullying in any capacity is linked to increased risk for suicidal ideation and behavior, and echoes previous literature documenting particularly strong mental health implications for bully-victims.”
This study, conducted by Dorothy L. Espelage, Ph.D, and Melissa K. Holt, Ph.D., surveyed 661 students ages 10-13. It found:
• 60% of bully-victims had thought about killing themselves in the past 6 months (a bully-victim is someone who is bullied and then turns on others and bullies them);
• 43% of bully-victims had actually attempted it;
• Kids were 2.4 times more likely to report suicidal ideation if they were bullied;
• They were 3.3 times more likely to report a suicide attempt if they were bullied.
Anat Brunstein Klomek, Ph.D., of the School of Psychology at Columbia University, said, in 2012, “Frequent victimization (of girls) is associated with later suicide attempts and completed suicides, even after controlling for conduct and depression symptoms. Frequent childhood victimization puts girls at risk for later suicidal behavior, regardless of childhood psychopathology.”
There is a clear link between bullying and suicide. The only question is one of degree.
