I described in my last SharePost how I had been bullied for years during my childhood, both physically and emotionally. As you can imagine, it's painful to dredge these memories up, although to be honest, I wonder if they ever really went too far under the surface. I think that this is the real danger of bullying. Even if the child makes it through a bullied childhood physically intact, there is no way that he or she is not affected emotionally and mentally by the bullying. Any adult who's been bullied carries the scars, and their self-image and sense of self worth can be forever distorted by it. The overweight boy who was called "fatty" may grow up to be fit and athletic, but to some extent, he'll always see himself the same way that other children did.

But let's go back to the present, to what a child that you may know is going through. The child who's enduring the bullying suffers emotionally, in every way you can think of. His self-image takes hit after hit, and he feels impotent and helpless to control the situation. None of us, adult or child, do well emotionally when we have no control over our daily lives. Being bullied can lead to depression and anxiety, and in some truly tragic cases, it can cause a child to commit suicide.

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“I’ve grown up on medication,” my patient Julie told me recently. “I don’t have a sense of who I really am without it.”

At 31, she had been on one antidepressant or another nearly continuously since she was 14. There was little question that she had very serious depression and had survived several suicide attempts. In fact, she credited the medication with saving her life.

But now she was raising an equally fundamental question: how the drugs might have affected her psychological development and core identity.

Children's mental well-being may affect the types of jobs they eventually get, and, thereby, their odds of work-related stress, new research findings suggest.

In a study of more than 8,000 British adults followed since birth in 1958, researchers found that those who had shown "internalizing behaviors" as children -- such as excessive sadness, anxiety or withdrawal -- were more likely to end up with a stressful working life.

This included jobs with high demands, little autonomy or little job security.

These job stressors, in turn, were linked to a greater risk of depression and anxiety once the study participants reached middle-age, the researchers report in the journal Occupational and Environmental Medicine.

Caring for farm animals appears to offer a therapeutic benefit for people with mental illness, according to new research.

Earlier studies with cats and dogs have shown that animal-human interaction can decrease stress and improve self-confidence and social competence. But less is known about whether working with other types of animals offers any benefits to those struggling with anxiety or other psychiatric disorders. Even so, the use of farms to promote mental health is increasing in Europe and the United States, as various treatment programs offer so-called “green” care, which includes time in community gardens and on farms as a form of therapy.

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