Posts Tagged ‘mental health’
Wednesday, September 23rd, 2015
At WBI, Dr. Ruth, I and several of the staff have listened to long-winded tales of misery endured at the hands of workplace bullies for many years. It amazes us that as many people survive the process as they do. It’s a testament to human resilience.
Suicide is the abandonment of hope, of not seeing any future, of not perceiving alternatives. It happens. How often it is the choice of bullied workers is not known. The international pioneer of the movement, Heinz Leymann, wrote in the early 1990’s that about 10% of those bullied do take their lives. It was his educated guess.
Now comes an important study from our Norwegian friends at the Bergen Bullying Research Group led by Stale Einarsen. The principal author of the study published Sept. 17 in the American Journal of Public Health is Morten Birkeland Nielsen.
The subtitle of the article is “A 3-Wave Longitudinal Norwegian Study.” The key contribution made by the study is that it measured the same group of people during three different time periods. Its longitudinal approach clarifies the sequence of events. It was a test to determine which caused which — bullying at work or considering suicide (the academics and clinicians call it suicidal ideation). The one that preceded the other can be considered a cause of the second.
The study overcame a problem common to all cross-sectional studies (in which different groups of people are measured only once) — the question of correlation between factors. That is, if we ran a study here at the WBI website of bullied individuals and asked two questions — have you been bullied and have you considered suicide — and the two scores were highly correlated, we still could not say with certainty that bullying caused people to consider suicide. The Nielsen, et al., study solved that problem with its unique tracking of a single group over time — in 2005, 2007 and again in 2010. In wave 1, 2,539 (our of 4500 solicited from a national random sample) returned the researchers’ surveys. By 2010, the sample was still at 1,291 individuals — the final group with three measurements.
Tags: American Journal of Public Health, Einarsen, Gary Namie, mental health, negative impact, Nielsen, suicide, workplace bullying, workplace bullying insititute
Posted in Bullying & Health, Bullying-Related Research, Social/Mgmt/Epid Sciences, WBI Education | 1 Archived Comment | Post A Comment (
Monday, June 2nd, 2014
New longitudinal study documents long-term mental health consequences
Einarsen, S. & Nielsen, M.B. (2014) Workplace bullying as an antecedent of mental health problems: A five-year prospective and representative study. International Archives of Occupational & Environmental Health, May 20, 2014. DOI 10.1007/s00420-014-0944-7
Professor Stale Einarsen, colleagues and students conduct cutting-edge research into workplace bullying at the University of Bergen, Norway. This new study employees a longitudinal design. That is, it follows a group of people over 5 years, longer than the typical 12-24 months follow-up in other longitudinal works. Over time, the researcher has the chance to see an escalation of the bullying and the relative permanence of its effects on bullied individuals.
Tags: anxiety, Bergen Bullying Research Group, depression, longitudinal study, mental health, NAQ, Norwegians, psychological distress, Stale Einarsen, victimization, workplace bullying
Posted in Bullying-Related Research, Social/Mgmt/Epid Sciences, Tutorials About Bullying, WBI Education | 1 Archived Comment | Post A Comment (
Friday, May 18th, 2012
Advocates of “Healthy Workplace” legislation (in New York State in 2011-12: A4258/S4289) have been promoting a bill that would amend the labor law, in relation to establishing a private cause of action for an abusive work environment.