Take Home Essay: Bullying
“Nearly one of every three students said that they had experienced occasional or frequent involvement as a victim or perpetrator in bullying” (Nansel and others, 2001, 217). These adolescents who are victims of bullying are far more likely to experience depression and have thoughts of suicide than those who are not bullied (Brunstein Klomek and others, 2007). The fact that so many adolescents are victims of bullying and that they are affected so extremely by bullying, shows that bullying is the biggest problem facing adolescents today. Bullying can be the route of a number of other problems that adolescents deal with on a day to day basis such as eating disorders, depression, and generally poor health. Victims of bullying often have very poor social standings which can have negative effects on the mental health of these adolescents.
Adolescents can be bullied about a number of different things which is why it effects people in so many different ways and can cause so many different health problems. Victims of bullying are belittled about looks or speech most often out of any other type of bullying (Santrock, 2011). I think that this is very troubling data because adolescents have no control over the way that they look or talk and bullying can be so extreme that they are forced to take drastic measures in an attempt to change the way that they look. This is the where the problem with eating disorders comes in. Adolescents turn to anorexia and bulimia because they are unhappy with the way that their body looks. These adolescents may be reminded of the way that their body looks every day by bullies with can spur on these conditions or just make them worse. This is a huge problem because eating disorders can have many negative short and long term effects on the body, all for something only endured through adolescents. Eating disorders are not the only health problem that can be attributed to bullying. A study revealed that bullies,...