The hidden toll of bullying on young minds

What goes on within the halls of every school? The whispers, the giggles, the jeers. It all seeps into a burgeoning child until one jeer is internalized. Until one child drops out of school. Until a household questions how something so "normal" could ever go so far. 

But it's not normal. It's an invisible epidemic that exists in the classroom and on the computer and invades figurative wounds from within. Yet eventually, research exists to catch up to far too many who've already known  what's known as a risk factor for the victimized child, their peers, and the projected future for all bullying transforms those bully and those bullied  and all at the expense of life, immediate or delayed. 

Recent findings published in Frontiers in Public Health assess this as a world wide phenomenon and an ultimate confession far too many embarrassed persons can admit is happening right under their noses. “A number of factors are involved in young people's mental health, and experiencing bullying is a risk factor” (Hästbacka et al., 2025). 

But experiencing exposure is unsurprising, inevitable. Exposure means downward spirals into depressive panicked, life threatening episodes from town to town around continents. When humiliation becomes commonplace mental health suffers. “There is convincing evidence of causal relationship between bullying victimization in children and adolescents and adverse health outcomes including anxiety, depression, poor general and mental health non-suicidal self-injury, suicide attempts and suicide ideation" (Moore et al., 2017). 

Causal. One word that should stop anyone in their tracks. Causation does not equal correlation it makes a link from one child's destructive behaviors to another's ineffective disposition. 

But beyond victimization, the stigma invades intruding thoughts over innocent lives wherein peer to peer intimidation exposes children to loneliness through disconnection  even bullied kids want friends because they're kids as well they know what's expected of them  but when sidelined for poor behavior they become rendered Lonely through their bullying. The qualitative findings from Finland 2025 state, “Bullying and cyberbullying are strongly associated with loneliness, but little research has been conducted on this topic” (Hästbacka et al., 2025). 

But those who are bullied and even cyberbullied  over the long term render themselves lonely regardless of one bad experience. The quantitative findings from the analysis conducted about child bullies reveal that those victimized are “approximately twice as likely to report loneliness (OR = 1.89; 95% CI: 1.39-2.57) and poor life satisfaction (OR = 2.26; 95% CI: 1.41-3.60)” (Moore et al., 2017).To a teen, feeling alone is worse than being bullied in the first place. It’s a deep cut that hurts but hurts silently.  

We acknowledge injury when it comes with marks we can see, but it's the injuries most invisible to us where bullying takes hold. While bullying is a known precursor to depression, as if we need more analyses about the subject, this one notes that "those exposed to bullying victimization had an increased risk of depression (OR = 2.21; 95% CI: 1.34-3.65)" (Moore et al., 2017). 

Twice the risk and yet it's still something many schools worldwide contend with and frame as a disciplinary problem instead of a mental health one. The bully is suspended, the victim is given a week of sympathy, and then everyone goes about their days. Yet findings suggest that what happens once the bullying stops a person gets through life. 

Even the researchers from the Finnish study comment that "further studies could investigate prevention interventions in school bullying situations especially related to how bullying prevention programs are implemented and how staff and parents perceive and intervene with bullying situations" (Hästbacka et al., 2025).  Indicating that there's a larger problem of adult intervention since adults contextualize bullying through their own experiences but fail to realize how much more worse it is today in a more globalized, interconnected world. 

This is why these studies essentially read like a red flag. When children learn to keep their pain silent because no one believes them, they fail to fight for themselves. And we know from the statistics where this lands them. Greater incidence of depression, greater incidence of suicide, greater incidence of believing that no one ever cared about them in the first place even when there were systems in place meant to help them. 

But as one researcher noted prevention isn't hopeless it's just under resourced. Schools need more than anti-bullying posters and one day assemblies. Schools need cultural shifts to make empathy a subject requirement and accountability a facet of peer interaction. Homes need to discuss digital interactions as easily as they discuss grades. Teachers need to be trained and have time to recognize a silence as a scream.