The impact of bullying
Social Harm
Humans are social animals. We routinely rely on others to make us feel human and connected. Bullying disrupts groups of co-workers. Sometimes bullies play divide ‘n conquer games ordering colleagues to not help or communicate with the target.
More common is the group’s tendency to informally separate themselves from the target. Resentment for exposing peers to the target’s misery evolves into estrangement and eventual abandonment. Co-workers don’t want to be near the target lest they become the next prey.
There is research showing that witnesses suffer from bullying, too. When the bully is a co-worker, the principal weapon is to withhold approval of human contact and validation. Targets begin to doubt their sanity. Family and friends remain supportive for targets the longer than co-workers.
If the bullying does not stop and the target does not stop obsessing, spouses can tire of the vicarious misery and leave the emotionally draining relationship.
Mental Harm
Bullying is often called psychological harassment or violence. What makes it psychological is bullying’s impact on the person’s mental health and sense of well-being. The personalized, focused nature of the assault destabilizes and disassembles the target’s identity, ego strength, and ability to rebound from the assaults. The longer the exposure to stressors like bullying, the more severe the psychological impact. When stress goes unabated, it compromises both a target’s physical and mental health.
Psychological-Emotional Injuries include:
- Debilitating Anxiety, Panic Attacks (>80%)
- Clinical Depression: new to person or exacerbated condition previously controlled (39%)
- Post-traumatic Stress (PTSD) from deliberate human-inflicted abuse (30% of targeted women; 21% of men)
PTSD is the result of environments that traumatize, in those working conditions there is little predictability or control. This can create and intensive or overwhelming threat to a person which often results in the destruction of their sense of security.
Please know that above are injuries. Depression starts in bullied workers who never experienced it before. For the person who was previously depressed and successfully managing it, bullying exacerbates the condition. Bullying causes injuries, albeit psychological in nature and unseen, as surely one can be injured from physically unsafe conditions at work.
Bullying, Economic Crises and Suicide
In these times of massive unemployment and loss of health insurance, many people are stressed as much as bullied workers have always been. Without insurance, mental health help is often unaffordable. The raging economic crisis strains individuals, couples, and children. Known effects include increased domestic violence and disruption of normal childhood development.
Sometimes, the violence is turned inward. When the “way out” seems unattainable and no alternatives can be imagined, some people contemplate suicide. If you or someone you know are talking about suicide, please call xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Physical Harm
Stressors, aspects of the work environment and behavior of people working there, can generate stress. Stress is the biological human response. It is physiological and real, not just imagined. Low-level stress may be necessary to compel people to act. However, severe stress which prevents rational, controlled action is negative.
Physical health problems from stress include:
- Cardiovascular problems: hypertension to strokes, heart attacks
- Adverse Neurological changes: neurotransmitter disruption, hippocampus shrinkage
- Immunilogical impairment: more frequent infections of greater severity
- Fibromyalgia, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
- Diabetes
- Skin Disorders
Some physical indications of the above stress might include:
- Nausea
- Tremors of the lips, hands
- Feeling uncoordinated
- Chills
- Profuse Sweating
- Diarrhea
- Rapid heart beat
- Rapid breathing
- Increased blood pressure
- Chest Pain
- Uncontrollable crying
- Headaches
All of the symptoms can start small, but are warnings that something is happening.
Economic Harm
Workplace bullying, by definition, happens at work. It interferes with the target’s confidence that her or his livelihood is assured. Broad societal economic crises threaten millions of workers at the same time and impersonally. Bullying is a laser-focused, personalized economic crisis affecting the target and her or his family. When bullies have control over the targets’ livelihood (as in 72% of situations), they have tremendous leverage to cause financial pain. Single parent workers are the most vulnerable.
Controlling bullies can block transfers to a safe job, can make targets so miserable that they quit (constructive discharge), or impair target health to the extent they have to quit to stop the stress from campaign of interpersonal destruction.
Some economic harms include:
- Lost ability to be left alone to do the once ‘loved job’ (23%)
- Forced to transfer from loved job, often a punitive transfer (13%)
- Constructively discharged without reasonable cause (24%)
- Target quits to reverse decline in health and sanity (40%)
