“Bullying is violence towards another person,” they said, but then is a fight between two hockey players considered bullying? “Bullying is when the victim feels left out, like they have nobody,” they said, but then if a group of people repeatedly don’t invite you to have lunch with them, is that bullying? “Bullying is when someone says bad things about you,” they said, but then is gossip considered bullying? 

The definition of peer victimization (i.e. bullying) is “the repeated exposure, over time, of a person to negative actions on the part of one or more people when there is a certain imbalance of power.” Bullying can be identified by three main characteristics: It’s repeated and ongoing, there’s intent to harm on the part of the bully, there is a power imbalance. 

Bullying is not about anger, or even about conflict. It’s about contempt — a powerful feeling of dislike towards someone considered worthless, inferior, or undeserving of respect. None of us are. We all deserve respect, so why is bullying so prevalent? Or in the words of one of the students, “If we all want it to stop, why does it still happen?” The answer is in the little things we do — those little things we think don’t really matter.  

Bullying is described as “the perfect storm.” Many stars need to align for a bullying situation to be created: A person who’s prone to be a bully has to interact with a person who’s prone to be a victim, in an environment that allows it. Most of us are spectators. If we think it won’t matter, if we do nothing because we’re afraid to, we don’t want to be a tattletale, we think we don’t matter, or if we laugh, just a bit, because we think it’s a bit funny, because it makes us feel good that it’s not us who are being bullied, because it makes us feel strong, we are encouraging the bullying cycle. A cycle which would have suffocated without us.  

We need to know how to differentiate what is bullying from what isn’t because we really don’t want to be tattletales, we don’t want to be too politically correct and make a big deal out of something that isn’t, but we do want bullying to stop. So the next time you hear some juicy gossip, let it go. When the popular girls don’t invite you to sit with them, find another friend who’s really worth your friendship. But when you see someone being humiliated by their boss over and over again, picked on by a group of kids or ridiculed in a public internet space, say something and support the victim. Because in an environment that allows bullying, that doesn’t show respect for other human beings, you may be next.

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I hear this often from my patients. It is a powerful statement, raising contradicting emotions. Some people are relieved. They think, “I have a medical illness which medication can solve. It’s not my fault. I’m not weak, lazy or just making it up. I’ll take medication and feel all better, exactly like the time I had pneumonia and took antibiotics.” Others are enraged and think, “I know there’s a psychological reason for my depression. I want to understand it and do something about it. If it’s just a neurochemical imbalance, there’s nothing I can do. It’s out of my control. It’s just a drug company scheme. I feel like a lab rat and there’s no way to know what kind of side effects I’ll have in the future.”

“Mmm…,” I say (because I’m a psychiatrist), “Well… it’s neither this or that. This is not a perfect analogy, but think of moving your arm. When you move your arm, the levels of neurotransmitters in your neurons change. These are the chemicals you say are not balanced in your body. They are the way neurons communicate with each other – instead of words, they use neurotransmitters. When you want to move your arm, neurons pass on the message and the levels change. Hypothetically, you could have taken a drug that would change levels of neurotransmitters in neurons leading to your arm, thereby making it move. It doesn’t mean you can’t do it on your own. The same with depression. There are studies that show that psychotherapy has the same effect on neurotransmitter levels as medication.”

Disorders of the mind are much more complicated than regular medical illness. Placing depression in the same category as pneumonia has its advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, exactly like having pneumonia, it is not the patient’s fault. On the other hand, depression is so much more complicated than pneumonia that we cannot say, “Just take medication and we promise it’ll go away.”

For some people, medication is the right way to go, for others, psychotherapy, and for some, both. If you are depressed or anxious, I hope that understanding that “neurochemical imbalance” is not something you can’t comprehend or something that is out of reach, but is just a way that your mind communicates with your body, something that can change with either medication or psychotherapy (and sometimes even on its own), will help you make the right treatment choice for you.

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