A new study has made some glaring exposures about bullying and its long time impact among children.
The study conducted by King’s College London found that the effect of bullying in childhood is evident nearly 40 years later.
For this new research, the researchers used the data collected during the British National Child Development Study which included information of children born in England, Scotland, and Wales during one week in 1958.
For the study, the researchers included 7,771 children whose exposure to bullying at the age of seven and 11 were recorded. The participating children were followed up until the age of 50.
The researchers found that approximately 28 percent were bullied occasionally and 15 percent were bullied frequently.
The study found that participants who were bullied were more likely to have poorer physical and psychological health and cognitive functioning at age 50.
However, those who were frequently bullied were at an increased risk of depression, anxiety disorders and suicidal thoughts.
Another study has found that children who are bullied are more than twice as likely to have suicidal thoughts and to make attempts of taking lives as their peer who aren’t bullied.
The situation is more worrisome as researchers point that such types of bullying or harassment that happens on internet, commonly called cyberbullying, are more closely linked to suicidal thoughts than in-person bullying.
Suicide is termed as one of the biggest causes of death in the adolescents across the globe. In the United States, about 20 percent of adolescents seriously consider suicide and between 5 percent and 8 percent of adolescents attempt suicide each year.
Suicidal thoughts were more strongly associated to cyberbullying than to traditional bullying, but the researchers caution that this finding is based on data from only a handful of studies.
