What Happens Inside the Mind of a Cyberbullying Victim Before They Consider Suicide? Effat University Research Offers New Answers

A study co-authored by a researcher from Effat University’s College of Humanities sheds new light on the psychological processes that make cyberbullying a suicide risk — and why current prevention efforts may be targeting the wrong variables.

Suicide is the second leading cause of death among people aged 15 to 29 worldwide. Cyberbullying is consistently identified as one of the factors that elevates risk in that age group. Yet for all the research that has established this link, the field has made relatively limited progress on a more fundamental question: why does cyberbullying raise suicide risk in some young people and not others, and what is happening psychologically in the gap between online harassment and suicidal thought?

A study published in BMC Psychiatry in February 2024, co-authored by Souheil Hallit of the Psychology Department at Effat University‘s College of Humanities, pushes that question further than most previous research has gone. Rather than simply confirming the association between cyberbullying and suicidal ideation — that association is already well-established — the study set out to identify a mediating psychological mechanism that could inform how prevention programs are designed and delivered.

The Design and Sample

The research was conducted as part of the PEARLS project, a large binational cross-cultural initiative spanning Lebanon and Tunisia. This particular paper focused on Lebanese participants, drawing on data from 3,103 healthy community participants surveyed between June and September 2022. The mean age of the sample was 21.73 years, 63.6% were female, and all participants had no prior history of diagnosed mental illness or antipsychotic medication — a critical design decision. The study was not looking at clinical populations already known to be at risk. It was asking what happens in otherwise healthy young people.

Of those surveyed, 18.8% reported suicidal ideation — a figure consistent with other research showing high rates of such thoughts among Lebanese youth, a population that has been navigating years of compounding national crises alongside the mental health pressures common to young adults across the region.

Participants were assessed using validated instruments covering cyberbullying perpetration and victimization, suicidal ideation, and psychotic experiences — the latter divided into positive dimensions, such as unusual perceptions, and negative dimensions, such as emotional withdrawal and reduced motivation.

The Findings

The central hypothesis the researchers tested was that psychotic experiences — specifically subclinical symptoms that fall below the threshold of a formal diagnosis — act as a mediator in the relationship between cyberbullying and suicidal ideation. Mediation analysis confirmed this.

Both positive and negative psychotic experiences partially mediated the path from cyberbullying involvement to suicidal ideation, whether the individual was a perpetrator or a victim. Being more heavily involved in cyberbullying was associated with experiencing more severe psychotic symptoms. More severe psychotic symptoms were in turn associated with higher levels of suicidal ideation. The direct relationship between cyberbullying and suicidal ideation was also confirmed independently of these indirect pathways.

The finding held in both directions — for those doing the bullying and for those on the receiving end of it — which itself adds a layer of complexity to how the issue is typically framed. Perpetrators are rarely the focus of suicide prevention conversations, yet this research suggests they may be carrying their own elevated psychological risk.

Rethinking Prevention

The study’s implications for how prevention programs are structured are direct. The researchers acknowledge that reducing cyberbullying at scale is not a realistic primary intervention strategy. Its prevalence is too high and its spread through digital platforms too embedded in daily life for suppression to serve as a meaningful solution.

What can be targeted more effectively, the study argues, are the internal psychological factors that amplify the impact of cyberbullying exposure. Specifically, the presence of attenuated psychotic symptoms — subclinical experiences in otherwise healthy individuals that do not constitute a diagnosable disorder but that nonetheless elevate vulnerability — should, the researchers argue, be incorporated into suicide risk assessments as a standard component. This is not currently standard practice in most prevention frameworks, which tend to concentrate on depression and anxiety as the primary psychological mediators.

The researchers also advocate for multilevel intervention approaches that operate simultaneously at the school, community, and clinical level, addressing both the external environment of online harassment and the internal landscape of psychological risk. Evidence-based programs incorporating digital citizenship, empathy development, communication skills, and coping strategies are identified as the most promising tools for reducing suicide risk in young people exposed to cyberbullying.

A Region Underserved by Research

The study is positioned within a broader context of research scarcity in the Middle East and North Africa. Suicide rates across the region are widely believed to be substantially underreported, with deaths frequently attributed to other causes due to the social and cultural stigma surrounding suicide in many Arab societies. At the same time, cyberbullying has expanded rapidly among young people across the region as smartphone access and social media use have grown.

The combination — high exposure, high stigma, limited data — makes research like this particularly valuable for the region, even as the authors are careful to note its limitations. The cross-sectional design prevents causal conclusions, and the sample characteristics — predominantly female, unmarried, tertiary-educated, and living with family — limit how far the findings can be generalized. Future longitudinal work in larger and more representative samples is identified as the clear next step.