Adolescence is a time of particular vulnerability to mental health disorders. As young people undergo rapid biological, social, and emotional changes, they’re exposed to multiple stressors that can impact their mental well-being. Almost half of all lifetime mental health disorders start before the age of fourteen, and having a mental health disorder during adolescence is an important predictor of mental health challenges in adulthood.
Certain factors can help protect teenagers’ mental health during this time. One of the most important is interpersonal relationships – with friends, family members, or the community. Friendships can provide a sense of meaning and belonging, emotional support, and build self-esteem that nurture resilience and well-being. Research has repeatedly found that high-quality friendships in adolescence are associated with fewer symptoms of depression, anxiety, and other mental health symptoms.
However, friendships also have the potential to harm young people’s well-being. This can happen in friendships that are high in conflict or involve relational harm, such as the breaking of trust, exclusion, or manipulation. Just as positive friendships are solidly linked to good mental health, negative friendships are associated with a broad range of mental health challenges.
In this blog, we look at peer victimisation and conflict within friendships, and their impact on young people’s mental health. We also touch on how parents can support young people experiencing difficult friendships and when additional help is needed.
What Is Peer Victimisation in Friendships?
Peer victimisation, often referred to as bullying, is a type of interpersonal violence or harm that takes place between friends or peers. Peer victimisation can involve physical violence, verbal insults, emotional manipulation, or relational harm, such as spreading rumours or social exclusion.
Peer victimisation often takes place between individuals or groups who don’t have any positive affiliation and have separate groups of friends. But it can also happen within friendships: between dyads where one, two, or both people self-identify as friends.
Human relationships are complex, and we often form attachments to people who harm or hurt us, even though it’s detrimental to our well-being. Sometimes, friendships may begin with a pretence of, or even genuine, mutual respect, that later changes into behaviours of victimisation and harm. In other cases, adolescents may form friendships with a person who harms them because they are isolated, lonely, or have low self-esteem.
Within friendships, adolescent friendships, relational harm may be more common than other forms of harm, especially among teenage girls. Some examples of relational harm include:
- Intentionally excluding someone from a group, activity or conversation
- Spreading false information about a person
- Refusing to speak to someone or emotionally withdrawing to cause harm
- Threatening to end a friendship
- Critising and putting a person down
A study among Taiwanese middle school students found that in about 8% of instances of verbal and about 12% of instances of physical bullying, both the perpetrator and the person harmed identified each other as friends.
How Does Physical, Verbal or Relational Harm in Friendships Impact Young People’s Mental Health?
Physical, verbal and relational harm within friendships can have a profound impact on young people’s mental health, both at the time and in the future. Research has found that relational victimisation in best friendships is associated with symptoms of both anxiety and depression.
More generally, experiences of bullying, within and outside of friendships, are associated with symptoms of:
- anxiety
- depression
- social isolation
- self-harm behaviours
- suicidal ideation
- psychotic symptoms such as auditory and visual hallucinations
Peer victimisation not only impacts adolescents’ mental health now; it also affects their well-being in the future. Young adults who were bullied as children experience lasting effects on their psychological well-being, relationships and trust, and eating disorders and body image.
Friendship Conflict and Adolescent Mental Health
Sometimes, friendships can be harmful for adolescent mental health even without patterns of victimisation and physical or relational harm. This can happen when there is a lot of conflict within a friendship, leading to instability, anxiety, and stress.
High-conflict friendships can cause anxiety about finding a resolution to the conflict and the possibility of losing the friendship. When friends repeatedly fall out with one another, they may also experience feelings of loss and grief before making up again. This instability, stress, and emotional intensity can take an emotional toll on young people and deeply impact their well-being.
Because friendships are often so crucial to adolescents’ identity, friendship conflict and instability can also have a profound effect on their sense of self.
A recent study found that high friendship conflict was associated with depression, anxiety, and stress. It also found that self-compassion could help protect young people from the negative emotional impacts of friendship conflict.
Online Friendships, Social Media Fall-Outs and Indirect Aggression
Both friendship conflict and peer victimisation can exist in online friendships, as well as offline ones. Many adolescent friendships are now also both in-person and online: friends may meet in-person inside or outside of school, but also communicate consistently on social media.
Some teenagers may have conflicts with friends online that are never acknowledged in real life. This is especially common among girls, where gender norms mean that face-to-face conflicts and direct aggression are often considered a social taboo.
Online conflicts, such as leaving hurtful comments on a post or blocking another person, may never be addressed face-to-face. Instead, adolescents may take some distance from one another without taking steps to resolve the conflict. When conflicts aren’t addressed, unresolved issues can affect the friendship in the long term, leading to tensions, distance, or anxiety.
Online friendships and social media communication can also be platforms of cyberbullying: peer victimisation that takes place online. Cyberbullying might involve sending harmful messages, sharing someone’s private content online, or creating fake accounts to damage a person’s reputation. Like other forms of bullying, cyberbullying can have a detrimental impact on young people’s well-being.
Supporting Adolescents Experiencing Harm from Friends
When a friendship is harming a teenager’s mental health, it’s important to have some understanding of the dynamics of the friendship. High-conflict friendships require a different approach from bullying and peer victimisation, both in terms of how a young person might respond and the involvement of parents, teachers, and communities.
Speaking to a Young Person about Bullying
Having an open conversation with a young person about what they’re experiencing can help parents and other figures identify instances of victimisation and bullying. Holding conversations about bullying in general can also help to quickly recognise when bullying happens to a young person or their friends. This might involve:
- Having frequent discussions about bullying as part of everyday conversations
- Emphasising the importance of sharing when a person is being bullied
- Asking a young person about their day
When a young person is being bullied by a friend, they might feel very confused or conflicted about what is happening. They might also give contradictory information that doesn’t seem to make sense, or try to make excuses for their friend’s behaviour.
If a young person shares with you that they have been bullied by a friend, stay calm and let them know that you’re there to help. This might involve:
- Thanking them for speaking with you about it
- Asking how they might like you to support
- Validating their feelings and listening carefully to their experiences
Sometimes, young people might feel worried about ending a friendship and losing their friend, despite the harm they are experiencing. If they don’t have a wide social network, they may also be anxious about feeling lonely or forming new relationships. Reassure them that they are a valued and loved person and that they can overcome the loss of this friendship. Let them know that it’s normal for adolescents to change friendship groups and friendships, and that while making new friends can take some time, they will get there.
If a teenager seems to be in denial about a friend’s behaviours or makes excuses for the harm they have caused, it’s best to call out and label specific behaviours that are problematic and explain why. Make sure that they don’t feel judged for choosing to be friends with that person and avoid making general negative comments about them. Focus on building the young person’s self-esteem and supporting them to put time into other friendships and relationships.
Preventing Bullying
If you think that a child may be being bullied at school, it’s important to speak wth the school about what’s happening. Many schools have an anti-bullying policy that designates an appropriate contact point. If they don’t, you might want to speak with a teacher or year group leader.
When you speak with the school, they should make a plan about how they will approach the issue. You should expect the school to follow up and tell you what has happened.
Seeking Mental Health Support for Young People
If a young person’s friendship difficulties or experiences of bullying are impacting their mental health, it’s important to seek professional support. Therapists can help young people navigate friendship conflicts or the grief of losing a friendship. They can support young people with mental health symptoms that often follow experiences of bullying, including anxiety, depression, body image issues and low self-esteem.
The sooner a young person can receive support, the better. Early intervention helps prevent mental health symptoms from intensifying and protects against long-term harm to mental well-being.
The Wave Clinic: Specialist Mental Health Support for Young People and Families
The Wave Clinic offers specialist mental health support for children, adolescents, young adults and families. We take a whole-person approach to mental health care, emphasising the role of interpersonal relationships and past experiences in shaping how young people think, feel, and act today.
We offer residential, intensive outpatient and outpatient programs from our treatment spaces in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Dubai, UAE. Our programs are trauma-focused, sensitively addressing traumatic experiences and early life adversity from the start of each treatment plan. We centre the family throughout our programs, from collaborative decision-making to parenting intensives and weeks of residential family therapy.
If you’re interested in our programs, get in touch today to find out more.
