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This is going to be a long post... about a girl I grew up with who was bullied endlessly by many kids in the school. There always seem to be a few who are just the victims in a class, that the majority of the kids picked on and she was "that girl". I never directly bullied anybody, it's just not in my nature, but some of my good friends bullied this girl and I stood by and watched. I always felt some guilt about not standing up for her ever or telling other people to leave her alone. There was something about her that was odd. You couldn't really put your finger on it, but she didn't quite have the social skills to maneuver in society with her peers. There were a couple other girls she hung out and they were all kind of "odd". I'm going to call this girl LM, for ease.
So you all know I worked in mental health for a long time, inpatient psych. I did work with adults for a few years of my career although most of it was in child & adolescent pscyh. I worked at a hospital on the east side of Detroit, not far from when I grew up. My routine every morning was to put my stuff away, and head to the nursing station to get names of new admissions so I could plan who I needed to do an assessment for each day. So one day, I walk out to the board and see LM's name. She had an unusual name so I knew it had to be her. I was immediately struck with "Oh my gosh, what did we do to her over all those years?" I wracked my brain, trying to remember if I was ever actually mean to her and couldn't remember ever saying or doing anything to make fun of her like others did. So I went and introduced myself, not sure she'd recognize me (of course she would, we lived on the same street for 18 years). I said "Hi, I'm Dee and I'm your Occupational Therapist while you're here in the hospital." She said "You're not my OT, you're my neighbor!" She actually sounded happy about that, so I breathed a little sigh of relief, gave her the OT schedule and told her I'd see her in groups later in the day and we'd talk more later. I went to read her chart and discovered she suffered schizophrenia. I really felt a lot of guilt the first few days she was in the hospital and it was awkward for me. I was so incredibly uncomfortable and put a lot of thought into what had gone wrong for LM. Schizophrenia is usually not diagnose until the early 20s and we were 28 at this time. I came to the realization during her hospitalization that the bullying obviously didn't cause her to be schizophrenic. Even though childhood schizophrenia is rare, when I think about her own behavior throughout our school years, she was "odd". It became obvious to me that she had some schizoaffective traits her whole life, which is why she seemed so "odd" to everybody. Kids pick up that people are "different" and don't know quite how to deal with that.
I've thought a lot about the kinds of kids who get bullied, especially after working in adolescent psych. They are the kids who are "odd" in some way, the kids who don't have self esteem. There were kids who picked on me for some things and some of their comments affected me for years, but I was definitely a kid who didn't have much self esteem. I was able to outwardly stand up for myself and make it stop, but at the same time, it affected me internally. LM didn't have the ability to make it stop. I'm sure it affected her internally, but it wasn't the cause of her mental illness. It was actually more a symptom of her mental illness.
People who commit suicide are mentally ill. Period. They either don't have the coping skills, don't have the support environment, or are too depressed to deal with things in general. Sometimes they can't see other solutions. For some of them, the reasons for mental illness are situational but for others, it is truly a chemical imbalance in the brain that requires meds. Does that make bullying ok? No, absolutely not. We should make every effort to teach our kids to be tolerant of others who might be "odd" and to have empathy toward others rather than to prey on them. But bullies...well, they have their own issues.
Bullies usually bully because they, themselves, feel inferior and they prey on the few who are weaker than they are. I don't believe that people are mean or predatory by nature. I believe they too have a form of mental illness. I worked with the bullied kids who were hospitalized for mental illness but I worked with just as many of the bullies. In the hospital, interestingly, they were all kind of on the same playing field and I believe, sometimes, they did learn about the dynamics and come to understand that none of them felt very good about who they were, but they handled it in opposite ways. I can honestly say that 97% of the kids I worked with, both the bullies and the bullied, were NOT from supportive, loving home environments. The bullies need help, just as the bullied need help. Deep inside, both are hurting a lot.
I don't like the term bullycide at all. It's suicide, no matter how you word it.
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