I reported earlier that a Norwegian study revealed that abused targets are twice as likely to have suicidal thoughts than those who were never abused. Pioneer Heinz Leymann estimated that 10 percent of those bullied take their lives.
Researchers defined bullying as harassment, badgering, and freezing out that generally:
It happens so often that there’s now a term for it. “Bullycide” happens when the cause of suicide is attributable to the victim having been bullied.
Now researchers in Australia report similar findings. Australian researchers determined that workplace bullying or harassment was associated with 1.54 greater odds of suicide ideation.
Findings show that none of us have a thick enough skin to be exempt from the workplace abuse-suicide connection. Not only did researchers find nothing to support the idea that targets are those with a weakness that brings on psychological assaults, but evidence shows that targets are often high performing, highly ethical employees whose competence poses a threat to their low performing, low ethical bosses. The bully’s only real motivator is to battle the target while having the upper hand – an unethical tactic used to uphold the image they long for but are unable to get through competence:
Normally having competence and ethics would help someone sleep at night. But with these traits, a target of workplace abuse can find themselves on a slippery slope to bullycide — and it can happen to any of us. It's a natural response that to long-term stress that impairs decision-making by changing brain chemistry — and it can begin to reverse when the stress stops.
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