Being a target of negative experiences by one’s peers has consistently been related to decreased self-worth, poor engagement in school, and worse grades among children and adolescents. One of the most consistent of these consequences is depressive symptoms. Put simply, kids’ mental health is strongly impacted by being picked on by their classmates at school. Our recently published study examined data from over 100,000 Brazilian adolescents to disentangle how pernicious the effect of being victimized was on reports of symptoms of depression.

Our paper was published in a special issue of the open-access journal, Frontiers in Developmental Psychology. We used data collected by the Brazilian government as part of their 2019 Pesquisa Nacional de Saúde do Escolar (PeNSE, National Survey of School Health) study, organized by the Ministry of Health. About 165,000 adolescents from across the country were randomly selected to be part of this large-scale study assessing aspects of adolescent physical health (including drug use, risky sexual behavior, but also mental health and measures of their school experiences). Using these data, we aimed to examine exactly how different experiences of victimization were related to Brazilian adolescents' reports of depressive symptoms. 

Depressive symptoms were determined according to students’ responses regarding how often they........

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