How bullying can harm your brain

Earlier this month, when new students arrived at Western University, the fall semester didn’t kick off with the traditional “Frosh Week.”

Instead, the initiation week was renamed “Western OWeek 2022” (Orientation Week), which represents an attempt to move away from the culture of ritual hazing and excessive drinking that contributed to tragedy in September 2021 — the death of a student and reports of sexual assaults.

We don’t mean to single out that school. Allegations of sexual assault — and coverups — continue to surface at some of our most valorized institutions in Canada.

As such, it’s easy to see that it’s high time to address our systemic problems. And, according to Jennifer Fraser, speaker, author and founder of “The Bullied Brain,” we need to focus this conversation on one main part of our bodies — our grey matter.

“Because we don’t learn much about the brain in school and we don’t talk about the brain, we don’t know that this key organ actually gets harmed really badly by all forms of bullying and abuse,” said Fraser. “It’s well documented and can actually be seen on a brain scan.”

Fraser, a Victoria, B.C. resident who’s been researching the effect of bullying on the brain for over a decade, said neuroscience has established that repetitive bullying can leave neurological scars and is associated with a shrunken hippocampus. And a smaller hippocampus, the part of the brain associated with memory, learning and emotional regulation, is associated with depression and Alzheimer’s.

“You might also see an enlarged amygdala in the brain scan of someone who’s been bullied or abused a great deal,” explained Fraser. “And that makes perfect sense, because the amygdala is the part of the brain that’s involved in threat detection and danger.

“If someone’s always on high alert because their brain has been programmed to believe it’s only a matter of time before the next onslaught, the amygdala gets large and takes over more ‘cortical real estate.’”

Fraser argued that the existence of evidence linking bullying to visible physical differences in the brain should change the way we think about, well, basically everything connected to childhood education. Instead of thinking about hazing and bullying in moral terms, it needs to be framed as a straightforward health issue and treated the way we’d deal with any activity associated with negative health outcomes.

“When I grew up, it was absolutely normal to smoke,” said Fraser. “Your doctor would smoke while he wrote your prescription. And we believed in the Marlboro Man and that we would become tough and independent and have great adventures if we were smoking a cigarette.”

“Over the course of my lifetime we learned that tobacco is poison,” she continued. “And we stopped. And the reason we stopped is because the government invested in getting the message out and now you can’t buy a cigarette package without seeing blackened lungs.”

Fraser’s position is that we need to associate every instance of a coach belittling a player for missing a goal or a teacher putting a student down for not knowing the right answer with brain injury. Although we often only talk about child-on-child bullying, Fraser said that schoolyard bullies often mimic adults — including teachers and coaches.

Preventing bullying will take time and a massive effort, obviously. In the meantime, Fraser advises people to take steps to help themselves recover in her recently released book, “The Bullied Brain: Heal Your Scars and Restore Your Health.”

“Each and every chapter has an activation step that’s grounded in research and specific evidence-based strategies for how you can restore and repair damage,” said Fraser. “It’s not about trying to replace mental health practitioners, of course, but there are things that you can do to make your brain much healthier and help it get back to an even stronger place than it was before you were harmed.”

Fraser has worked closely with neuroscientists to learn about strategies for healing the “bullied brain.” Like many experts on brain health, she champions mindfulness practice and breathwork, because deep breathing is a way of signalling your brain that it’s safe — the opposite of the stress caused by bullying.

“I think another really important thing to know is that one of the best things you can do for your brain is fitness,” she said. “And it’s not just the oxygenated blood in the brain, it’s also communicating to the brain that you’re not trapped and you can move and change and do things, which is a really important message to send to it.”

These, and other exercises can not only make the brain stronger but can also help people feel more empowered.

“People need to understand that neuroplasticity (the brain’s ability to change) means that up until the very last day they’re on the planet, they can change their brain,” she said. “Just like you can get in really great physical shape and build muscles and look different, with hard work you can do the same thing with the brain.

“It’s not a quick fix,” she added. “It’s not easy but you can do exactly the same thing inside your skull that you do with your body.”

Still a quicker fix, probably, than changing the culture on campus, in private schools or in Hockey Canada. It took half a century to get the message out about smoking and, of course, plenty of people still smoke. So, changing the name to “OWeek” isn’t going to be enough.

It’s a start, though, up a long path to prevent bullying from happening in the first place, which would be a lot better — for everyone — than trying to fix the damage it causes later on in life.

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