A Mother's Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy(69)
It mirrors our own conversations, too. One of Dylan’s friends told me he’d never seen any examples of students mistreating other students—and then, in the very next breath, told me about kids hurling a soda can full of tobacco spit in his direction at a school sporting event. Another of Dylan’s friends told us a car full of kids threw glass bottles and other trash at their group as they drove by. (Larkin reports that throwing trash from moving cars at lower-caste students was common.) A resigned Dylan tried to comfort a horrified newcomer to the group: “You get used to it. It happens all the time.”
It hurts that it was so easy for Dylan to hide what his life was like at school. I still have dreams in which I discover his hidden pain. In one, I am undressing him, still a toddler, for a bath. I pull his shirt off and see a bloody network of concealed cuts across his torso. Even writing about it now makes me cry.
Dylan’s struggles may have been hidden from us, but they were not uncommon ones. A 2011 study by the Centers for Disease Control found that 20 percent of high school students nationwide reported they had been bullied on school property in the thirty days before the survey; an even higher percentage reported they’d been bullied on social media. Anti-bullying advocates suggest the number may be closer to 30 percent.
A tremendous amount of research has been done on the effects of peer harassment, and there is unquestionably a correlation between bullying and brain health disorders that stretches all the way into adulthood. A Duke University study found that, compared with kids who weren’t bullied, those who were had four times the prevalence of agoraphobia, generalized anxiety, and panic disorder as adults. The bullies themselves had four times the risk of developing antisocial personality disorder.
There is also a strong association between bullying and depression and suicide. Both being a victim and bullying others is related to high risks of depression, suicidal ideation, and suicide attempts. Researchers at Yale found that victims of bullying were two to nine times more likely to report suicidal thoughts than other children.
The connection between bullying and violence toward others is more complicated, although again there’s a correlation. Bullied kids often become bullies themselves, which appears to be what happened with Dylan and Eric. Larkin cites a student who claims they terrorized her brother, a student with special needs, so badly he was afraid to come to school. Researchers call students who both bully and suffer bullying “bully-victims,” and find that these bully-victims are at the greatest psychological risk. “Their numbers, compared to those never involved in bullying, tell the story: 14 times the risk of panic disorder, 5 times the risk of depressive disorders, and 10 times the risk of suicidal thoughts and behavior.”
The humiliation and degradation Dylan experienced at the hands of his schoolmates likely did contribute to his psychological state. At some point his anger, which had for years been directed toward himself, began to turn outward, and the idea of personal destruction he found so comforting began to include others. Repeated incidents of disrespect at school, an environment that should have been safe, may very well have constituted the pivot point.
Of course, even if Dylan did endure humiliation at the hands of his classmates, it cannot absolve him in any way of responsibility for what he did. At the same time, I have deep regrets I wasn’t more in tune with Dylan’s feelings about the place he spent his days. I wish I had spent much more time and energy on determining the climate and culture of the school (and how appropriate it was for Dylan) than on assessing it academically.
Once in a while, I allow myself to fantasize about the thousand ways the story could have ended differently, and all of those fantasies begin with a different school. My biggest regret, though, is that I did not do whatever it would have taken to know what Dylan’s internal life was really like.
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At a suicide prevention conference I attended, a father described how he’d failed to recognize signs of depression in his twelve-year-old daughter. He’d noticed she’d been whinier and clingier than usual, sure, and complaining of invisible ailments, even after her pediatrician had found nothing wrong. My stomach hurts. My head hurts. She’d been more reluctant than usual to go to bed, too. Just to the end of this chapter. Five more minutes, I swear. But he had no inkling these were all potential signs of depression in a child of that age.
I hadn’t either. Years later, I mentioned this to a friend with an eleven-year-old daughter. She was sufficiently alarmed to conduct an informal poll of the experienced parents she knew. Would they have recognized clinginess, hypochondria, and sleep disturbances as possible symptoms of depression in their own kids? Not one of them would have. Would you?
More disturbingly, the father I met at that conference told me his daughter’s pediatrician had also not recognized these signs—never mind that she was at an elevated risk to die by suicide. In approximately 80 percent of completed suicides, the individual has seen a physician within the year before their death, and almost half have seen a doctor within the prior month. Dylan went to our family doctor with a sore throat weeks before he died.
It is essential for physicians to routinely screen for symptoms of depression and suicidal tendencies in their patients. Teachers, school counselors, coaches—these people can be powerful bystanders. Gatekeeper programs (like ASIST, the Applied Suicide Intervention Skills Training program by LivingWorks) teach participants to identify people struggling with persistent thoughts of suicide. The interventions they make can save lives.