I will be speaking at the Minnesota Psychological Association (MPA) Annual Meeting on Saturday March 28. The topic of my presentation will be “PTSD from bullying triggers Obsessive Compulsive Disorder”. This will be an excellent opportunity to speak to another group of mental health professionals. I had spoken at this same conference earlier in 2013.
This presentation is a unique combination of a number of timely issues such as bullying prevention, acceptance of cultural differences, mental health impact, mental illness stigma. The presentation illustrates a definitive connection between prolonged childhood bullying, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and the development of one of the more severe forms of OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) later in life. I believe that many mental health professionals will be able to learn about the devastating longer term impact of bullying and hopefully will be able to utilize this knowledge in working effectively with patients impacted in this manner.
The key message in this presentation is the fact that bullying can have long lasting devastating impact on young people. There are numerous individuals out there like me who have been lucky enough not to have committed suicide, but have had extremely difficult lives because of bullying. Several mental health professionals have commented to me that they had liked my presentation primarily because of the following reasons:
- It provides details on how prolonged bullying can trigger devastating mental illness that can ruin a person’s life;
- It describes several characteristics of this disease (onset, diagnosis, treatment, etc);
- It demonstrates impact of PTSD from bullying and how it manifested itself within the disease;
- It encourages OCD and other mental health sufferers to open up and accept treatment.