Bullying Affects Social Status?

An anonymous reader wrote to mention a ScienceDaily article about the social status effects of bullying on mice and men. From the article: "The results reveal neural mechanisms by which social learning is shaped by psychosocial experience and how antidepressants act in this particular brain circuit. They also suggest new strategies for treating mood disorders such as depression, social phobia and post-traumatic stress disorder, in which social withdrawal is a prominent symptom ... He and his colleagues also discovered that social defeat triggered an upheaval in gene expression in the target area of the circuit, the nucleus accumbens, located deep in the front part of the brain -- 309 genes increased in expression while 17 decreased."

False premise

[Hao Wu]

Why it always assumed that social withdrawal is a sign of individual sickness - but not the group itself which should stand in judgement?

Cultural impacts of antidepressants

[timeOday]

This study is interesting because it ties antidepressants right back to behavior. The percentage of Americans who use antidepressants is at least 15% and rising [cdc.gov]. Taken together, this means a sizeable segment of society is acting differently than they would have before. What, I wonder, are the aggregate impacts on society?

Bullying affects Politics?

[Speare]

I've also wondered if being the victim of bullying affected the socio-political choices you make in the future. For example, do those who've never experienced bulling see more or less need for protecting civil liberties and privacy? Do those who were loners in school see more or less need for organized labor? And so on.

I'm not saying Republicans are bullies and Democrats are victims or anything, but there sure seem to be a lot of people who just don't "get" the need for judicial oversight, fair representation in court or congress, support for the poor, or the concept of a truly open marketplace.

Re:Good way to get your ass kicked

[fa2k]

"Without BDNF in the circuit, an animal can't learn that a social stimulus is threatening and respond appropriately," explained Nestler. I hope nobody thinks this is a good thing... Still, it's strange that the BDNF-enable gene ssurvived natural selection. If the mice avoid social situations, it would be hard to reproduce.

Re:False premise

[kfg]

Among the wise solitude has ever been the cure for the depression caused by having to deal with people.

As the great philosopher Van Pelt said:

"I love mankind, it's people I can't stand."

The "dogs" among the apes will never understand the "cats," however, even though they rely on them to keep watch over the tribe through the night, lest they all get eaten by lions while they sleep.

And what the lions are doing eating in their sleep I'll never know.

KFG

Bloom's Lucifer Principle

[iiii]

For a much more in depth look at this check out Howard Bloom's "The Lucifer Principle". [amazon.com] It is an amazing new insight on how evolution really works, as competition between groups (superorganisms). He analyzes in depth the mechanisms that make drive this process. One of the main mechanisms is the pecking order, and the affect of an organism's (including a human) status in the pecking order on its biology is significant and surprising. I thought this book was amazing, revolutionary, and jam-packed with new ideas that ring true, supported by research from all corners of science.

Re:False premise

[EccentricAnomaly]

Why it always assumed that social withdrawal is a sign of individual sickness - but not the group itself which should stand in judgement?

You tell it, brother!!

You don't have to be outgoing type-A to be mentally healthy... or even what society considers mentally healthy to do well in this world. I recently heard an NPR story about how they've started to screen high school students with a questionnaire so that they can medicate people before they go off and kill themselves... but when I heard the 'warning signs' that they were looking for, I realized that they would have flagged me when I was in high school, and they would have tried to persuade my parents to medicate me. ...but the thing is that these medications kill all of your creativity (because lets face it creativity is often driven by depression and despair). I am positive that if I had been medicated I would not have accomplished even 10% of what I have accomplished in my life... things I have accomplished with my creativity and with a work ethic born of many, many failures. Sure, maybe I would have had more friends, and I probably would have gone to the prom, and maybe even gotten laid in high school... but I wouldn't have achieved nearly as much, and I probably wouldn't have been able to land my wife (who looks like a supermodel, but is also super-smart, and very funny).

Now my kids are in pre-school, and the teachers are concerned because they don't socialize well and have poor coordination... yeah my four year old reads at a first grade level... but they just see that as a sign of parents pushing too hard (we don't push him at all by the way, he's just a very curious kid). They want us to stop teaching him reading and math and try to push him more into sports and socializing... But I say, so what if he wants to be nerdy.. let him be nerdy.

Bullying is effective - Basis for coping

[behindthewall]

What this appears to infer is that bullying is an effective social strategy. Perhaps I should say, of its own and in a limited social context.

Effective down to the biological level.

If we can acknowledge that, perhaps we can stop some of the frustrating rhetoric about how the bully is "wrong" and should be "understood".

So, the bully has something tangible to gain from their behavior. (And I mean not just the immediate response but the long term social implications.) Does "correcting" that behavior address the sole root of the problem? Or do we also need to give those bullied effective tools for dealing with the bullying and for maintaining self esteem? Do we let them know just how important it is to maintain that self-esteem? (The article is saying that in failing to do so, they essentially become hard-wired for a different and seemingly less satisfying social role).

The bullying exists within a social context with constraining bounds. The parent of a bullied child can't go an beat the cr*p out of the bully -- not without going to jail. There are already limits that have been decided upon. So, we get to make choices. Can we then also choose and foster, at least to some extent, the types of personalities we wish to see succeed? The type of society we with to propagate?

For my part, if I ever have kids, they will have martial arts training. That part is a simple decision for me. It won't solve every problem, but it will increase the odds considerably that they won't find themselves forced to be pushed around, at least physically. And perhaps a good instructor can help with some of the mental aspects, as well -- I understand that is an essential component of good training.

Um...

[kiracatgirl]

How is this a good thing? It says that if they turn off your ability to learn the signs that a situation is potentially dangerous, you won't develop "social avoidance behaviour" due to bullying. That's nice, but wouldn't that mean you have to give the treatment BEFORE the subject is bullied? What does that due to being able to cope in real life? Would the subject end up being more prone to being mugged, raped, or caught in various violent situations due to his/her inability to recognize threatening behaviour and respond appropriately? This doesn't seem at all useful or even particularly enlightening. People know extensive bullying as a child often causes those social issues, and it'd be nice to get rid of them, but the only real solution is to get rid of the bullies - NOT to cripple the poor kids' ability to learn on the suspicion that they might be bullied later on.

Re:Bullying made me a brutally effective adult

[drooling-dog]

It's well known that abused children often grow up to be abusers themselves... Same thing going on here?

Re:False premise

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

Because most of the time social withdrawal is a sign of mental health issues. Are you going to try and prove otherwise? Or were you simply being argumentive and philosophical?

WAIT A MINUTE! RTFA...

[Anonymous Coward]

The social avoidance that normally develops when a mouse repeatedly experiences defeat by a dominant animal disappears when it lacks a gene for a memory molecule in a brain circuit for social learning, scientists funded by the National Institutes of Health's (NIH) National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) have discovered. Mice engineered to lack this memory molecule continued to welcome strangers in spite of repeated social defeat. Their unaltered peers subjected to the same hard knocks became confirmed loners -- unless the researchers treated them with antidepressants.

This is no cure. Ignoring the problem doesn't make it go away. If there is something more pathetic than being picked on, it is KISSING UP and continuing to TREAT WITH RESPECT the very a-holes engaged in the bullying. What is this shit? Reverse engineer me the EXACT OPPOSITE.

Something to chew on

[grimJester]

I'm not saying Republicans are bullies and Democrats are victims or anything, but there sure seem to be a lot of people who just don't "get" the need for judicial oversight, fair representation in court or congress, support for the poor, or the concept of a truly open marketplace.

There are loads of people in this discussion who seem to think this treatment is bad because punishing the bully should come first. The issues you describe are more of a rational "take a step back" view on things, while reacting with anger, wanting to punish the bad guy, seems to be an emotional reaction, something the victim would see as the problem before he's had a chance to calm down.

Consider this; a bully pushes you in the schoolyard, you fall, scrape your knee and start crying. A teacher saw the whole thing and walks up. What would you want to happen? Revenge!

Now, you're the teacher and the same thing happens. A little kid pushes another. The other scrapes his knee, starts crying. He's now on the ground, bleeding and crying. Which kid do you handle first?

To bring it back to he left/right thing; "That bully nees a good ass-whupping" would be a right-wing view, imo.

I was bullied. And it had rotten effects.

[TechieHermit]

Ok, first of all, I was bullied all the way through school. In public school, the bullying took the shape of beatings and physical attacks. In particular, a mean little shit named Scott D---- used me to "build his rep" (New York public schools work like prisons, socially). After I almost killed one of the bullies in the seventh grade (I got him in a chokehold and turned his face purple, then was attacked by twenty of his friends in, basically, a riot) I got pulled out of school.

I went to a private school in New Jersey, where the bullying wasn't physical, it was mental. I was one of the only poor kids there, and the rich kids would make fun of my clothes, my mannerisms, my lack of money, the fact that I wasn't invited to their parties, etc. I turned inwards, focusing on science and math and became one of the best students in the school; I drew comfort from the fact that I was one of the three smartest kids in the whole place. We geeks hung out together, and for the first time, I actually had some friends. This was very instructive.

When I went to college, I was again picked on off and on, but it was much more subdued. I knew some karate by that point but it wasn't enough. I was getting really tired of being so weak that other people could actually CHOOSE to pick on me and finally, I did something about it. I figured, if I can make myself so tough that the bullies THEMSELVES were afraid of me, maybe everyone would leave me in peace. So I did.

I joined the Marine Corps as a grunt, and found myself in a raid unit. This was essentially an infrantry unit which was almost (but not quite) special forces, whose duty it was to attack and destroy enemy bases at night, taking no prisoners and leaving nothing functional. Blowing up SAM sites, fire bases, things like that. That's what we were taught, anyway. We weren't used in combat, which I was quite happy about. But I did learn how to fight (and kill) on a level much more aggressive than most civilians ever do.

Smack dab in the middle of my enlistment, my unit was on float when Gulf War I happened. Again, we weren't used, we ended up floating offshore for 110 days, in a ship's berthing which had no air conditioning. It was like, 120+ degrees during the day and 70 at night. We were miserable. The tougher marines (keeping in mind that at six feet tall and 220 pounds, I was only mid-size for my unit) started beating on me because I was a "goddamn college kid" and so on. The longer they went without drinking, the more pissed off they got. I won't tell you the rest of that particular story, but eventually when I returned to the civilian world, I was quite a bit meaner and tougher than when I'd left it.

Luckily, for some reason, at 6' and 250 (when I got back) with skull tattoos and all that, people just didn't seem to want to pick on me anymore. Over the course of several years, I gradually relaxed and became more peaceful. I went back to college and studied Mechanical Engineering, but that didn't work out for me (no career prospects) and I switched to something I found more fun, i.e. computer science. I got my degree, had my dot-com experiences, and ended up working for the government.

It took me TEN YEARS to heal over all the mental scars I picked up in the marines (and earlier, in school). It's only been in the past few years that I've really started to feel relaxed, without the sense that ANY MINUTE something terrible is going to happen to me. Only lately have I been comfortable trusting someone who wasn't a blood relative (and then, only if I can determine that our interests are aligned enough that the person won't be tempted to screw me).

To this day, I don't trust people in general. I see the human race as petty, selfish, nasty, and fickle, with a mean-streak a mile wide that only needs an opportunity to show itself. I do my best to avoid crowds, gatherings, any sort of grouping of people... I try to be invisible, someone you wouldn't even look twice at. And I avoid others as best I can.

Sometimes I think a great crime has

Re:Cultural impacts of antidepressants

[greg_barton]

I'm more interested in the cultural impact of a genetic therapy that effects social memory of defeat. I mean, think about it: it's the perfect way to control a population. You get all of the benefits of tight social control with none of the downsides. Under influence of this therapy (and other, more fine tuned ones) the population could conceivably remain perfectly happy and productive while remaining under the tight grip of totalitarianism. (Which usually reduces productivity through unexpressed social unrest and incites rebellion.)

Re:I was bullied. And it had rotten effects.

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you.

Yeah, it really, really sucked at the time. But now, it's years later, and things have turned out pretty well for me. I keep to myself, mostly, and I'm enjoying a nice, quiet life.

I feel pretty lucky because I'm working in an office where everybody's really nice -- I cherish that. I think that they find it kind of funny that I adore them so much, but if they knew the whole story, they'd totally get it. ;)

It's weird; one side effect of having the childhood I had is that if someone's actually NICE to me, I totally adore them after that, and would walk through fire for 'em.

Re:At what point do you blame yourself?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just a thought, one thing I noticed with shock a few years after senior high, was that the so called "normal" kids, who I had taken the bullies to represent, actually didn't much like the bullies either - the bullies were actually a VERY distinct and different subset of the population, who just liked to pretend they were part of some normative whole.

And the rest of the kids had actually never had a problem with me, I had just assumed they did. They actually like me more than they liked the bullies. Not that I ever gave them a chance to show it, just like the mice in the article.

Anyway, a lot of this stuff is due to, as well as causes, something known clinically as a "personality disorder". You are right about the commonality of the bullies also having problems but dealing in a different way - many of them if diagnosed would show up as having Sociopathic Personality Disorder, which is like the "lite" version of being a full-blown psychopath. The impact they have on US lies on a continum that ranges from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (Ahhh! the Helicopters!), to Complex PTSD (Nothing wrong with me! now where did I put my heroin again...), to Borderline Personality Disorder (Don't Ask).

Sounds like you lucked out and got off the lift at the first floor, not to belittle how much it hurts - just that you are still aware it hurts. It's taken me 3 years of meds and therapy to even *remember* that it hurt ~ but then again my bullys were my parents, and it started before I could speak :-/

Oh, and as for blaming yourself, forget it. It's like blood in the water, they can spot us just as easily as we can spot them, and they know it's easier to pour salt in an existing wound than to create a new one (and yes, sociopaths actually *are* after the pain). They also look for people who are isolated - As a Marine you might have weighed 250lbs, but the "normal" guy with 10 friends to stand up for him effectively weighs a ton. No wonder the bullies prefer to go after the loners, the last thing they want is a fair fight.

Re:I don't know about you people...

[Dreamstalker_wolf]

Interesting question. Yes, I was bullied because I'm a naturally quiet person and in sixth grade I was reading at a ninth grade level (again, intelligent kids getting picked on). That ended when I punched out one of the kids after a few weeks of bordeline sexual harassment; for that, I almost got suspended. It took a threat from my parents to sue the school to get anything done (the bullies were suspended; a month later one of them got hauled to jail for throwing rocks at a police officer). I was even medicated from 4th to 10th grade because I wasn't "social" according to a shrink (i.e. didn't have eight zillion friends like all the other shallow jerks in my school). Antidepressants that shouldn't be used on children, various other un-fun things. I feel that the ordeal did make me a smarter and more interesting person because I had time to devote to other things (writing, reading, teaching myself computers, etc) than random social games.