The Michigan Telephone blog

I know it’s very popular these days to think that people should be able to just put their past behind them and move on with their lives after something bad happens, but unfortunately it just doesn’t work that way, and when we try to pretend otherwise we do so at our peril.  Read this, especially if you have children in your life:

Childhood Bullying May Lead To Mental Health Issues In Adults (Medical News Today)
Bullying by Childhood Peers Leaves a Trace That Can Change the Expression of a Gene Linked to Mood (ScienceDaily)

The takeaway quote is this:

“Many people think that our genes are immutable; however this study suggests that environment, even the social environment, can affect their functioning. This is particularly the case for victimization experiences in childhood, which change not only our stress response but also the functioning of genes involved in mood regulation” — Isabelle Ouellet-Morin, lead author of the study.

Although I don’t talk about it a lot, I don’t try to hide the fact that I was bullied as a child, particularly in Junior High School (even lost part of a tooth to a bully, and as far as I know he suffered no consequences for his act). And I can tell you that it definitely had a long lasting effect, though unfortunately that wasn’t even the worst period of my life. I think schools and police should treat bullying for what it actually is, at least in most cases where males are involved — assault and/or battery. If they have zero tolerance when a kid brings a butter knife to school, why do they not treat it as something major when a kid is being physically bullied?  I know they use the excuse that it’s hard to tell normal “horseplay” from bullying sometimes, but to my mind, if it looks like an altercation, then it needs to be investigated, and if one kid is seen getting involved in a lot of altercations, chances are he’s either a bully or a victim.

I don’t know that every school shooter or other demented person that fires into a crowd has been bullied, but I’d bet that some percentage were, and it’s probably a fairly significant percentage.  When I was 11 years old and in Junior High, if I’d had access to a firearm there might have been a couple dead bullies — I certainly wished them dead about a hundred times a day.  However, I would have never even thought about shooting any of the kids that hadn’t participated in tormenting me (nor any of my teachers, except maybe the one teacher that I’m convinced was either a pervert or a sadist, quite possibly both).  To be honest, though, as much as I was tormented I don’t think I could have brought myself to actually shoot one of the bullies — it was just a very strong fantasy that played out over and over in my 11-year-old brain (and usually it didn’t involve me being the cause of their demise – I’d fantasize about them being run over by the school bus, or walking into the path of an oncoming train).  However, I have to wonder what might have happened if I’d also been on some of the medication that they give out so freely to kids these days.  That medication affects different people in different ways, and I know that it turns some people into much meaner versions of themselves, and I would imagine that’s true with kids also.

Back when I was a kid, bullies were hardly ever punished by the school administration (at least not where I went to school) but yet we never had mass school shootings like we have today.  And, we also hardly ever had kids taking medication for mental or psychiatric conditions.  And, we didn’t have automatic weapons and assault weapons freely available to anyone with the cash to buy one (unless you count a six-shooter).  Somewhere along the line, our society went off the rails, and while I don’t know the exact cause I am pretty certain that if we had a zero-tolerance policy on bullying, the same way many of our schools have a policy on kids who bring butter knives and toy guns to school, it might save some kids from turning into monsters.  I REALLY wish people would take bullying more seriously, and it honestly baffles me why they don’t.

By the way, as an aside, there are a few religious kooks that are trying to blame the recent shootings on abortion, or some other thing they perceive as a moral failing in our society.  That, quite simply, is bullshit, and it’s the type of bullshit they put in fund-raising letters to their gullible followers.  If you are really looking to find where things went off a cliff, I think that the pivotal event in American society was the Vietnam War, which taught a whole generation of young people that their government and many of their elders really didn’t give a damn about them.  I think that scar, more than anything else, affected both my generation and the generations to follow.  Of course, the preachers of morality never seem to see anything immoral about war, in fact their attitude is “Thank You God for Killing My Enemies’ Children“.  Somehow I think the fact that we so easily go to war and kill actual living children could be much more easily cited as a reason that God might be judging us, if you’re prepared to go down that logical path (and I certainly am not, but I am just making the point that these attention-seeking religious kooks will use any “hook” they can find for fundraising purposes, no matter how ridiculous or mean-spirited it makes them appear).

Related articles

• Bullying by childhood peers leaves a trace that can change the expression of a gene linked to mood (medicalxpress.com)
• “Bullying And Mental Health: Study Links Anxiety, Hyperactivity In Kids To Bullying” (saintleoinkblot.com)
• Senate committee calls on federal government to lead national cyber-bullying strategy (o.canada.com)
• A study conducted on victims of bullying (asktina4advice.com)
• Bullying May Lead to PTSD in Victims (medicaldaily.com)
• Study: Childhood Bullying Starts With Parents (dfw.cbslocal.com)
• Children with mental health disorders more often identified as bullies (sciencedaily.com)
• On Not Being Adam Lanza: Why Dialogue on Mental Health Must Include People with Mental Illness (culturallydisoriented.wordpress.com)
• The Long-Term Health Consequences Of Bullying (medicalnewstoday.com)