Expository Essay on Bullying
Bullying is an antisocial behavior that has devastating consequences for bullying victims. Apart from fear and anxiety, other detrimental consequences of bullying include unhappiness, depression, and poor emotional and psychological well-being. Some of the common types of bullying are verbal, physical, and social bullying. Bullying has detrimental consequences on a person’s physical, emotional, and mental well-being. This expository essay on bullying offers insights into the dynamics of bullying and its impacts on the victims.
Bullying leads to poor academic performance. Government statistics on bullying indicate that about 160,000 children miss school on any given day due to bullying. Additionally, more than 280,000 students are physically attacked every day (Albuhairan et al., 2017). Due to fear of bullying, bullied children try to escape the experience by missing school. Skipping school is one of the reasons for poor academic performance in bullied children.
Besides, bullied children suffer from psychological problems that negatively impact their academic performance. Bullied children withdraw their attention from learning and participate in fewer in-class activities (Chen et al., 2020). For fear of standing out, bullied children suffer from low self-esteem, which impacts their academic performance. Besides, bullied children spend a lot of time thinking about their situation and how to get out of it. Such people fill their minds with negative/bad ideas of how to end their suffering. In turn, education/learning is given a back seat, leading to poor performance.
Bullied children have the highest risk of committing suicide. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention-CDC, bullied children exhibit suicide-related behaviors such as attempting suicide, suicide ideation, and committing suicide. Suicide ideation is thinking about, planning, or considering committing suicide (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2021). The feeling of hopelessness and helplessness make suicide victims contemplate committing suicide as a way of ending their suffering.
Bullied children suffer from depression and other psychological problems, making them sad and depressed. Such children are tormented psychologically, making them vulnerable to negative thoughts such as committing suicide. While linking bullying to suicide is complicated. Research shows that repeated bullying worsens feelings of rejection, isolation, exclusion, and despair. These feelings lead to contemplating/considering committing suicide.
Bullying is associated with mental health problems such as depression. Depending on the scale of bullying, victims of bullying exhibit mild, moderate, or severe depression coupled with extreme cases of mood changes. Most victims of bullying have some form of depressive disorder that leads to depression (Li & Shi, 2018). Researchers on depression reveal that there is a causal relationship between bullying and depression.
Isolation, exclusion, fear, and anxiety are some of the feelings that cause victims of bullying to become depressed. According to the CDC, children who were bullied during their early childhood risk developing depressive disorders and other psychiatric disorders. The report by the CDC also indicates that adults who were bullied at a young age suffer from clinical depression when they become adults (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2021).
Repeated and longer cases of bullying lead to functional impairments and other anxiety-related disorders. Victims of bullying exhibit signs such as irritability, thoughts of suicide, feeling helpless and worthless, and an acute feeling of sadness that refuses to go away. These are the feelings associated with depression in victims of bullying. The major types of depressive disorders common in victims of bullying include persistent depressive disorder and bipolar disorder (Simmons & Antshel, 2021).
Bipolar disorder is characterized by elevated moods called mania and periods of feeling down, which is depression. Persistent depressive disorder occurs when a person experiences the symptoms associated with depression. Persistent depressive disorder is very disruptive and interferes with all facets of a person’s life.
To conclude, bullying has serious consequences for victims. Some of the consequences of bullying include depression, committing suicide, and poor academic performance. Concerning poor academic performance, bullied children tend to skip school a lot, which negatively impacts their academic performance. Besides, bullied children lose focus and interest in learning, which makes their grades go down. Concerning suicide, bullied children are at a higher risk of committing suicide compared to children who are not bullied.
Victims of bullying at one point contemplate or consider committing suicide because of their depression. On depression, victims of bullying suffer depression and other depressive disorders such as anxiety. The longer the period of depression, the more devastating psychological issues for victims of bullying. Besides physical repercussions, bullying has detrimental consequences on a person’s physical, emotional, and mental well-being.
Expository Essay on Bullying References
Albuhairan, F., Abou Abbas, O., El Sayed, D., Badri, M., Alshahri, S., & De Vries, N. (2017). The relationship of bullying and physical violence to mental health and academic performance: A cross-sectional study among adolescents in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. International Journal Of Pediatrics And Adolescent Medicine, 4(2), 61–65.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2021). The relationship between bullying and suicide. https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/bullying-suicide-translation-final-a.pdf.
Chen, Y. L., Ho, H. Y., Hsiao, R. C., Lu, W. H., & Yen, C. F. (2020). Correlations between quality of life, school bullying, and suicide in adolescents with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. International Journal Of Environmental Research And Public Health, 17(9), 3262.
Li, Y., & Shi, J. (2018). Bullying and suicide in high school students: Findings from the 2015 California youth risk behavior survey. Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment, 28(6), 695–709.
Simmons, J. A., & Antshel, K. M. (2021). Bullying and depression in youth with ADHD: a systematic review. In Child & Youth Care Forum (Vol. 50, No. 3, pp. 379–414). Springer US.