nessiemonster88 replied to your post “You don't have to say you're "exaggerating" or that it "doesn't count"...”
Does bullying by your peers really count as abuse? I mean, for real? I was bullied almost constantly from age 8 to 16 by a number of different girls...and that would explain a lot. Like how hard I found it to make good female friends.... And how difficult it is sometimes to trust people. Ive done a fair amount of reading about Adverse Childhood Experiences, and it's not really mentioned?
Yes.
A lot of what gets talked about in the PTSD community is very political. Veterans got together to campaign for pensions and benefits; war as a cause of PTSD got talked about. Feminists got together to talk about ending sexual violence; sexual assault as a cause of PTSD got talked about. The research is funded by politics, and politics are funded by special interest groups getting together to say, “This is what we want people to pay attention to.” So a lot of research into bullying has only really happened since the 1990s, while research on war, assault, and child abuse was up and running in the 1970s. So there’s a literal headstart where we have so much more data on other forms of abuse.
But we have enough data. Enough data to say that bullying is not only as bad as child abuse, sometimes one person’s childhood being bullied leads to even worse mental health than someone else’s childhood being abused.
And yes, this is true even when they separate out the children who are bullied from the children who are maltreated by parents.
Even being teased by peers as a child can be a fundamental part of later anxiety disorders. Being cyberbullied can make children 4 times more likely to have poor mental health. Even without dysfunctional family lives, bullying puts children at much higher risk for depression, eating disorders, and self-harm.
Bullying. Counts.
