One study followed 1,420 subjects from Western North Carolina who were assessed four to six times between the ages of 9 and 16. Researchers asked both the children and their primary caregivers if they had been bullied or had bullied others in the three months before each assessment. Participants were divided into four groups: bullies, victims, bullies who also were victims, and children who were not exposed to bullying at all.  Participants were assessed again in young adulthood — at 19, 21 and between 24 and 26 — using structured diagnostic interviews.

Researchers found that victims of bullying in childhood were 4.3 times more likely to have an anxiety disorder as adults, compared to those with no history of bullying or being bullied. Bullies who were also victims were particularly troubled: they were 14.5 times more likely to develop panic disorder as adults, compared to those who did not experience bullying, and 4.8 times more likely to experience depression. The effects persisted even after the researchers accounted for pre-existing psychiatric problems or other factors that might have contributed to psychiatric disorders, like physical or sexual abuse, poverty and family instability.

One limitation of the study that I found is that bullying was not analyzed for frequency, and the researchers’ assessment did not distinguish between interpersonal and overt bullying. It only addressed bullying at school, not in other settings.  However, the study does show some concrete evidence considering most of what experts know about the effects of bullying comes from observational studies, not studies of children followed over time.  I think that this would change the conclusion of the study greatly and is something to definitely consider.

Another study, conducted at Duke University by William E. Copeland, lasted for an astounding 20 years and followed 1,270 North Carolina 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 among the groups could be attributed to differences in socio-economic status, or family dysfunction/instability, or maltreatment (which they defined as physical or sexual abuse). All three groups—the victims, the bullies, and the bully-victims—had higher rates of some type of family hardship than the kids who didn’t experience bullying at all. 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.

I found this study to be extremely in-depth, addressing all of the possible confounding variables.  Considering how long the study has gone for and the amount of people that were tested, I think that there a distinct correlation between bullying and long-term psychological effects.  One suggestion that I do have however is to analyze the difference in genders since there is a strong stereotype that girls are more emotional and weak, so it would be interesting to see if this remains true or not.

So WHY does bullying have such far-reaching impact? Copeland and his team suggest the experience may change kids’ physiological response to stress, and their ability to cope.  While this is true, one thing that I feel Copeland failed to mention is the insecurities that develop due to the bullying.  People who are picked on tend to become insecure about parts of themselves and I think this plays a major role in why some people have problems in the future because they are not confident in themselves.

It’s important to point out that Copeland and other researchers don’t define bullying broadly, in a way that encompasses a lot of mutual conflict among kids, or one-time fighting. Bullying is physical or verbal harassment that takes place repeatedly and involves a power imbalance—one kid, or group of kids, making another kid miserable by lording power over him. As Dan Olweus, the Scandinavian psychologist who launched the field of bullying studies in the 1960s, has been arguing for many years, this is a particular form of harmful aggression. And so the effort to prevent bullying isn’t about pretending that kids will always be nice to each other, or that they don’t have to learn to weather some adversity.

In conclusion, there is strong evidence that bullying can be permanently scarring.  Although this is not the case for everyone, these studies show that thousands of kids have difficulty recovering from the incidents.  While it is possible that a person can recover from the trauma, it is clear that both the bullies and victims are not forgetting what happened between them and are impacted psychologically in some way. So before you continue to be mean to someone, think twice about how you are harming their life, and your own.