Bullying victims have more psychotic symptoms

In fact, with longer-lasting and more severe bullying comes greater risk, Dr. Andrea Schreier of Warwick Medical School in Coventry, England and her colleagues found.

"Chronic or severe peer victimization has non-trivial, adverse, long-term consequences," they write in the Archives of General Psychiatry. "Reduction of peer victimization and the resulting stress caused to victims could be a worthwhile target for prevention and early intervention efforts for common mental health problems and psychosis."

Both kids and adults "commonly" have psychosis-like symptoms or experiences, without full-blown mental illness, Schreier and her team explain. Young children who have these symptoms are more likely to develop schizophrenia and similar types of mental illness as young adults, the researchers add, while trauma in childhood also has been tied to adult psychosis risk.

To investigate whether there might be a direct link between trauma from bullying and psychosis symptoms, the researchers looked at 6,437 12-year-olds participating in a long-term study of children and their parents. All of the children had been completing annual psychological and physical health assessments since they were seven years old.