Inside The Bullied Brain

Bullying can leave an indelible imprint on a teen’s brain at a time when it is still growing and developing. Being ostracized by one’s peers, it can lead to reduced connectivity in the brain and even sabotage the growth of new neurons.

Scientists began to look at the brains of adults who had been abused as children and realize that the damage wasn’t just emotional. Their brains had undergone long-term changes. Over the past two decades, neuroscientists have discovered that serious physical and sexual abuse during early childhood can cause short-circuit in a normal brain development.

Martin Teicher, a neuroscientist at McLean Hospital in Belmont, has been examining the effects of being verbally abused by a parent. In his study of more than 1,000 young adults, Teicher found that verbal abuse could be as damaging to psychological functioning as the physical kind. Teicher and  his colleagues did a research on young adults that varied

 in how many kinds of verbal harassment such as teasing, ridicule, criticism, screaming, and swearing.

What the scientists found was that kids who had been bullied reported more symptoms of depression, anxiety, and other psychiatric disorders than the kids who hadn’t. In fact, emotional abuse from peers turned out to be as damaging to mental health as emotional abuse from parents.

Teicher then decided to scan the brains of 63 of his young adult subjects. Those who reported having been mistreated by their peers had observable abnormalities in a part of the brain known as the corpus callosum which is vital in visual processing, memory, and more. The neurons in their corpus callosums had less myelin sheath, a coating that speeds communication between the cells.

On the other hand, Tracy Vaillancourt, a psychologist at the University of Ottawa, has been following a group of 12-year-olds, including some who had a history of being victimized by their peers, and assessing their functioning every six months. Among other things, she has discovered that being tormented by other kids can recalibrate children’s levels of cortisol, a hormone pumped out by the body during times of stress.

In a 2008 paper published in the journal Aggressive Behavior, Vaillancourt demonstrated that boys who are occasionally bullied have higher levels of cortisol than their peers. Bullied girls, meanwhile, seem to have abnormally low levels of the hormone.

 This can cause the weakening of the immune system, and even worse, it can damage and even kill neurons in the hippocampus, potentially leading to memory problems that could make academics more difficult. 

Research into the neurological effects of bullying is still preliminary.. But these early findings suggest that bullying, even the verbal kind, is more similar to physical and sexual abuse than we might like to admit. No longer can we draw a clear line between the two kinds of mistreatment as they can both produce the same kind of trauma.

So, is bullying serious enough?

Adapted from an article by Emily Anthes from www.boston.com

Posted by Daniella Mokhtar