Depression can lead to many harmful results, and one result of bullying is depression or a change in your personality. Schools, children, and adults used to think that bullying had only an emotional impact on you, but after researching more about bullying effects, they soon discovered that it actually had an impact on your brain. Bullying messes with adolescent hormones and it also damages the growth of new neurons or nerve cells. (Inside The Bullied Brain). Messing with your adolescent hormones means it makes your behaviour unstable. You’ll start acting differently on different occassions and you won’t be able to control your behaviour. Damaging your nerve cells is a detrimental effect because it meant you’d have trouble transmitting information through your body. So you wouldn’t react naturally and you wouldn’t be able to proccess information as well. This side effect of bullying would mean that you wouldn’t do so good in school either. Relating to changes in personality, changes in your brain also make you feel emotionally unstable and it will mess with your feelings. Bullies can make victims feel emotionally unstable, with a result of the victims having problems with their family or maybe something more serious, like an eating disorder. When you get bullied, your whole brain doesn’t work normally. You start looking down on yourself and feel like you need to do better. This may lead you to taking risks and doing what’s abnormal and unnatural to you. When you get bullied, nothing really matters anymore so you don’t see the risk in anything. This causes you to take drugs, get into fights and even carry around weapons. Your brain doesn’t function properly, so you can’t see the dangers in things because you’re common knowledge isn’t there. So a victim of a bully wouldn’t think that taking drugs was going to do much harm. They wouldn’t know that getting into fights was dangerous and that it would cause trouble for you. And they wouldn’t think that weapons could harm you terribly. Following a change in personality and depression, it could lead you to worse things, such as self-harm.
After teens feel hurt from being bullied, they need to feel more pain so that the bullying doesn’t feel so bad, so they self-harm. Self-harming is when somebody physically hurts themselves, such as cutting themselves. Self-harming is when somebody physically hurts themselves, such as cutting themselves. Most people self harm because they are dealing with emotions that are difficult to manage. Bullying would be included in this category. When you’re being bullied, you feel like nobody likes you and your emotions are hard to cope with. After a while, you just don’t know what to do anymore so you think the only option left is to hurt yourself. Some people hurt themselves to make them stronger, but some people do it to hide the pain from being bullied. Either way, you’re still hurting yourself and hurting yourself has dangers. The dangers include becoming addicted, accidental death, accidentally cutting important vains, or lots of bleeding. There are numerous cases and stories of self-harming with teenagers. A personal story would would be able characterize the effects of self-harming better. (Self Harm | My Story) This story is a personal story about a 15 year old girl who had experiences of self-harming. When this girl was in the 4th grade, she had just figured out what self-harming was. She had never thought of anything like it before, and she said, ‘I thought I was the last person who’d ever do it.’ Despite that fact, she soon did begin to self-harm for the reason being, her friends were doing it and that was putting her in a rough situation. Once she tried it, she loved it. She said, ‘the weird thing was that afterwards, I felt so much better.’ She got addicted because it made her feel relieved and ‘like she’d let all her bottled up feelings out’. She also said it was ‘unbelievably hard’ to give up cutting herself. This meaning, it was addicting and as much as she tried to stop, she couldn’t. Overall, self-harming was dangerous and could lead to terrible actions. It could lead to another form of self-harming, but with a more permanent effect- suicide.
People around the world have lost friends and family to the dreaful commitment, that is suicide. Suicide is when somebody intentionally kills themself. Every 13.7 minutes someone in the United States dies by suicide. Not all cases of suicide are from bullying, but most cases involving teens are. Lots of cases of suicide are from cyber bullying as well. Cyber bullying is when you bully through cyber space, such as text messages or social networking sites. Cyber bullying is an easier way for people to bully because they say things they’re too afraid to say in real life. Also when you’re being cyberbullied online, teachers and families are more unaware of what’s happening and so they’d never expect anything, which would make it easier to commit suicide. There are also different ways of commiting suicide easier. Different ways of committing suicide would include hanging yourself, drug overdosing, jumping off heights, carbon monoxide poisoning (from cars), and many more. Drug overdosing is one of the most common ways of killing yourself, due to availability of the substances. A poll has shown that 89% of people would prefer to take a pill rather than suffocate themself. With the use of a gun, it is most common to point the gun at the head and shoot. About 53.7% of the suicide cases in the US are from firearms. Committing suicide not only kills you, but leaves your friends and family in a state that isn’t managable, and this is all caused by bullying.
The harms and effects of bullying are definitely inconceivable. Teenagers around the world shouldn’t be experiencing depression, or hurting themselves, or even killing themselves. We need to work together so that 30% of grade six students that are bullied decrease to 0%. This is why you should donate money to help prevent bullying: Beat Bullying.
