Link between bullying and suicide overblown: psych prof
Posted September 7, 2012 8:35 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) – Back to school can mean back to the pain of the playground for some children.
News1130 is exploring the focus on bullying in our classrooms and whether links to suicide are being overblown.
Dr. Eric Caine is the John Romano Professor and Chair of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Rochester Medical Center. He has raised a few eyebrows with this assertion; after all, we have seen highly-publicized cases where bullying has been directly blamed for suicide.
“People have connected bullying and suicide among youth in a one-to-one, cause-and-effect fashion. They are really two separate problems and it’s important to think about them separately and understand that occasionally they intersect. It’s really essential for people to appreciate how they are different,” he says.
Caine, also the co-director for The Center for the Study and Prevention of Suicide, points out bullying is extremely common, suicides are rare, and the reasons behind them are complex. He feels there has been an overly-simple reaction from many people.
“Part of the discussion that came up was to have legislation that outlaws bullying. I think that is, in some ways, a misuse of legislation and, in other ways, naive because these are really common behaviours. Many of us have been targeted at one time in our life by bullies. These are things where we need moral authority to change in terms of leadership, in terms of family values, in terms of community values, in terms of how schools and workplaces are run,” he argues.
Caine says you can’t legislate away bad behaviour. “It’s a crude tool. Think of how effective legislation was in prohibition. When you have common behaviours, you need more than the law in order to really affect those behaviours.”
“Think of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, which has developed a tremendous amount of moral authority. Some of that led to changes in legal blood alcohol levels, for example, but much more of it was that you had to be a responsible person because you might hurt somebody. That notion of being a responsible person, of being part of a community, those are the kinds of things we need to do with bullying.”
As for suicide prevention, Caine says there is an array of things that can be done, but dealing with bullying is just a small fraction of it.
“It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t deal with bullying, of course we should. It’s just that we shouldn’t link the two and think that they go together in an ‘A leads to B’ kind of way.”
