Types of cyberbullying involvement and mental health problems

Abstract

Cyberbullying has been found to be associated with self-harm related behaviours and mental health difficulties. The current study aims to investigate adolescents’ viewing of web content related to self-harm and suicide as well as different kinds of mental health difficulties while differentiating between types of involvement in cyberbullying (bullies, victims or bully-victims). Their involvement in cyberbullying and viewing of self-harm or suicide websites was asked of 18,709 11–16 year old Internet users in 25 European countries. Further, crossing of a clinical threshold for different mental health difficulties was assessed. The viewing of self-harm and suicide websites differed according to the involvement in cyberbullying with those not involved showing the least and bully-victims showing the highest prevalence. Those not involved in cyberbullying showed the lowest prevalence for being above the clinical threshold for all mental health difficulties. Victims and bully-victims were highest on emotional and peer problems while bullies and bully-victims were highest for conduct problems. Multi-nominal logistic regression predicting cyberbullying categories showed that the relations above remained stable while adding mental health difficulties and website content simultaneously as predictors. Findings suggest that viewing of self-harm related websites as well as mental health difficulties are independently associated with different types of involvement in cyberbullying