Reviewing more than two decades of data, the researchers found that bullied children, regardless of their sex, face an elevated risk of developing anxiety disorders, depression and suicidal thoughts in later years. The U.S. researchers said their new study, published Wednesday in the journal JAMA Psychiatry, is “most definitive to date in establishing the long-term psychological effects of bullying.” 
 
 They said they used “a much richer data set” than the Finnish researchers. The study followed 1,420 subjects from Western North Carolina who were assessed four to six times between the ages of 9 and 16. Researchers asked both the children and their primary caregivers if they had been bullied or had bullied others in the three months before each assessment. Participants were divided into four groups: bullies, victims, bullies who also were victims, and children who were not exposed to bullying at all. “Those who said they had been bullied, plus those who were both victims and aggressors, were at higher risk for psychiatric disorders compared with those with no history of being bullied. “We were actually able to say being a victim of bullying is having an effect a decade later, above and beyond other psychiatric problems in childhood and other adversities,” said William E. Copeland, lead author of the study and an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University Medical Center. The young people who were only victims had higher levels of depressive disorders, anxiety disorders, generalized anxiety, panic disorder and agoraphobia,” according to the study.
– Bullied kids are at greater risk of a range of psychological problems years later, a study suggests. "Psychological damage doesn’t just go away because a person grew up and is no longer bullied," says a researcher. And that applies to both sexes, the study finds, challenging earlier research that suggested the long-term toll was more pronounced among girls. This study referred to "a much richer data set," researchers say. "We were actually able to say being a victim of bullying is having an effect a decade later." Children in North Carolina joined the study at age nine, 11, or 13. Researchers collected data by interviewing the kids and their parents, following 1,270 of them into adulthood, the Globe and Mail reports. Victims had "higher levels of depressive disorders, anxiety disorders, generalized anxiety, panic disorder, and agoraphobia," the study says. They suffered 4.3 times the anxiety disorder risk of children with no bullying in their pasts, the New York Times reports. Bullies themselves faced a higher risk of antisocial personality disorders, while male victims and bullies faced 18.5 times the risk of suicidal thoughts.