It is difficult to believe that, not long ago, school bullying was a rite of passage. Little was known about the negative impact bullying had on individuals and communities before the late 1970s. Targets of bullying and their carers suffered mostly in silence. Thankfully, we have come a long way in our understanding of bullying. This chapter will focus on a deep conceptual understanding of bullying. It will include learning to differentiate the several types of bullying and their manifestations. This understanding will help you apply the techniques suggested for enhancing students’ engagement discussed throughout this book to recognise, prevent and manage bullying in your school and classroom.

In the 1980s and 90s in psychology, many cross-cultural comparisons were made concerning individualism and collectivism with questionnaires and experiments. The largest number of them compared “collectivistic” Japanese with “individualistic” Americans. This chapter reviewed 48 such empirical comparisons and found that Japanese were no different from Americans in the degree of collectivism. Both questionnaire studies and experimental studies showed essentially the same pattern of results. Many researchers who believed in “Japanese collectivism” suspected flaws in those empirical studies. However, none of the suspected flaws was consistent with empirical evidence. For example, although it was suspected that “Japanese collectivism” was not supported because college students provided data as participants, the studies with non-student adults did not support this common view either. It is thus unquestionable that as a whole the empirical studies disproved the reality of “Japanese collectivism.”

Half of all mental health problems start by the age of 15 and the teenage and young adult years are particularly difficult for girls with high and increasing rates of anxiety, depression and self-harm. Many different factors contribute, including social media, peer pressures, focus on appearance, friends, relationships, schoolwork and, as Everyone’s Invited has recently highlighted, personal safety. There is tremendous pressure to conform with the expectations of others. Attitudes to women and girls seem to have gone into reverse during the author’s lifetime. It is too simplistic to view the problems of young women as a simply a ‘lack of self-esteem’. The difficulties they face in society are consistently underestimated and not taken seriously. Fast access to therapy is crucial. Bullying must be addressed effectively. Sexist and mysogynistic attitudes in school must be challenged and, given the easy access now to pornography, the issues of consent should addressed head on by both parents and schools. Using the example of Everyone’s Invited, women and girls need to reach out and support each other. The personal is still political.

Depression is a leading cause of disability in high- and middle-income countries and is of increasing relative burden in low-income countries. The Global Burden of Disease study illustrates how depression is increasing as a proportion of all the disabilities resulting from illness. This is because we know how to prevent other major causes of disability such as cardiovascular disease and infection and so their incidence is on the decline. Meanwhile, there is evidence that rates of depression are rising slightly. In order to have an impact on this major public health burden, we will need to devise preventative strategies to reduce the incidence. As depression is a continuum, much of the disability is experienced by the larger numbers of those with mild and moderate levels of depression who might not seek treatment for themselves. Therefore, effective preventative strategies applied to the whole population will have more widespread benefits than interventions simply targeted towards those at high risk. In order to develop preventative interventions, we need to know what causes depression.

Epidemiology tends to be primarily concerned with causes outside the individual or with genetic causes.

Research within Australia and around the world underscores the short- and long-term negative effects of bullying on children’s socio-emotional health and wellbeing. While there has been a significant increase in the number of studies conducted with upper primary and secondary students, comparatively fewer studies have focused on the prior-to-school and early school contexts. The few studies that have examined the effects of bullying in the early years emphasise its negative effects, with victims and bullies exhibiting psychosocial maladjustment and psychosomatic problems similar to outcomes reported in older cohorts (see Neilsen-Hewett et al., 2017). Bullying poses a significant risk to children’s socio-emotional wellbeing and mental health. A growing awareness of how bullying manifests in early peer contexts is therefore critical in the development of effective, preventative anti-bullying programs. The goal of this chapter is to provide a synthesis of this research, including an overview of the causes and correlates of bullying and its effects on children’s socio-emotional wellbeing.

This chapter considers children’s right to education and the protection of children’s rights in a school environment. Despite the importance of education to children, their right to education and to participation in school is conspicuously absent from much legislation and policy concerning schools. This chapter considers the extent to which children are recognised as rights-holders at school. It starts by considering school attendance, truancy and the punitive approach to parents who are unable to secure their child’s regular attendance at school. It then considers pupil behaviour and school discipline. The prevalence of bullying and peer abuse in schools raises the importance of protecting the rights of affected pupils to an education in a safe environment that ensures that they are all respected. Responding to this behaviour also raises the rights of perpetrators, particularly in the context of school discipline, the use of force and power to search pupils. The chapter then considers the law on exclusion and the right to education. Finally, it considers the extent to which children have a right to attend sex education and the extent of parental right to object.

Theories of change propose how intervention resources and activities might lead to the generation of outcomes. They are sometimes presented diagrammatically as logic models. Realist evaluators and others have suggested that interventions should be theorised in terms of how intervention mechanisms interact with context to generate outcomes. Our own trial of the Learning Together whole-school intervention to prevent bullying set out to define, refine and test such theories in the form of context–mechanism–outcome configurations (CMOCs). We drew on several sources to define our starting CMOCs. These included existing middle range theory. This is scientific theory about the general mechanisms (i.e. not necessarily concerning an intervention) that generate outcomes. This should be analytically general enough to apply to a range of settings, populations and/or outcomes, but specific enough to be useful in a given application. We also used previous research and public consultation to inform our CMOCs.

LGBTQIA+ patients are an important patient population to highlight when discussing urban emergency medicine. There are a multitude of terms regarding gender expression and identity that emergency medicine providers should familiarize themselves with if they plan on taking care of this patient population. Within the LGBTQIA+ population, there are specific medical and psychological issues that are relevant to each subgroup. Providers are not expected to know everything about their patients, but they must remember to remain open-minded and non-judgmental as they take care of everyone with precision and dedication. If a provider feels that the patient needs help in ways they cannot be of service, then the provider should be able to point the patient in the right direction via resources and referrals.

This chapter outlines the use of mentalizing as an essential process for unifying teams and creating a caring environment in relation to schools, fostering of children, and caring for babies in adverse circumstances. An individual’s mentalizing is strongly influenced by their social environment. Any intervention that aims to treat a person with mental health problems must take into consideration that person’s social milieu and the context of their treatment. This chapter discusses how to create a mentalizing milieu. In particular it describes the four quadrants of Adaptive Mentalization-Based Integrative Treatment (AMBIT), a relatively new approach that focuses on creating a mentalizing team, and it outlines Creating a Peaceful School Learning Environment (CAPSLE), a program that facilitates the development of a mentalizing environment in order to reduce bullying and aggression and improve learning in schools.