Dr. Jennifer Fraser: "Does childhood bullying have long term impacts?"

 In this blog post I brought you a really interesting TEDx talk about bullying and its neuroscientifical consequencies.

Dr. Jennifer Fraser is a tutor, teacher, researcher and author who has a Comparative Literature PhD from the University of Toronto. In this TEDx talk she talks a little about what neurological impacts bullying has on our brains and shares some personal stories about teacher-student bullying that she had been witnessed or investigated.

When watching the video, she first talks about a medical research conducted by several researchers in connection with childhood and abuse. "Only" 10 questions, but contains a lot.

Then she described a case happening at a school in which she was an investigator asking children about certain teachers and their bullying behaviour. She told the story of the headmaster's neglect behaviour towards the problem and that he did not even want to help the children, but even blamed them for this situation. The brilliant way is that she uses smoking as an example for how bullying affects people.  

As for a huge topic, she talked about that bullying alters the brain creating abnormalities in it that we can even see with MRI, fMRI and EEG too and she also added how these alterations affects the child's social relations and several other parts of their lives. 

As a second story she talked about another child abuse happened to one of her students and its later consequencies on the girl's life... the story is really devastating, I suggest you to be prepared of it mentally and emotionally as well!

She closes the talk with crushing statistics about suicides in different continents, such as America and Australia... you would never have guessed how huge the problem is!

 

I found it devastating that she experienced student-teacher bullying twice her life by witnessing and investigating it, but was also so relieved when she said she was a safe space for the victim students. Everyone deserves a safe space in situations like these! When I heard that the cases were not taken seriously when students seeked professional help in the justice system or sometimes at school, I got so mad about that. In a lot of cases from all around the world, school bullying is not taken seriously or not taken seriously enough! Neglect headmasters wanting to "broom the problem under the carpet", covering bullies instead of giving a hand to victims... We should make a change about that! 

I also found really interesting yet eerie, that bullying can have so much impact on people's brains that it can be altered on a level, even MRI and EEG can show the difference. 

After all these I think bullying is such a big problem we should find a solution as soon as we can! 

Here is the link for the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xwFAzxqvrw&ab_channel=TEDxTalks 

(the quality is not the best, therefore the subtitles can be different from what she's really saying, but in my opinion it is understandable enough to get a "picture" about what she is trying to tell to us:) )

_________HER BOOK ON BULLYING

She also wrote a book about the neuroscientifical consequencies of bullying. Even though I have never heard about it before - according to the quality of the TED talk - I truly believe it is worth to read it, especially for those who are deeply interested in neuroscience or the topic "bullying"... or if they want to heal!:)

A link for the book: 

https://www.amazon.com/Bullied-Brain-Scars-Restore-Health-ebook/dp/B09QMNYVFD