When Harassment and Bullying Becomes a Suicide-Prevention Issue

During Suicide Prevention Month, we hear a lot about checking on the people we love, recognizing warning signs, and encouraging people to ask for help. Those conversations are important, but there is another side of prevention that we do not discuss nearly enough: the way we treat people before they reach a crisis. Suicide prevention cannot focus only on what a struggling person should do. We also have to talk about what other people may be doing to them.

Bullying, harassment, stalking, public humiliation, threats, impersonation, false accusations, and repeated unwanted contact can cause serious psychological harm. It does not become harmless simply because it happens through a phone or computer instead of face-to-face. The person responsible may call each incident a joke, a misunderstanding, or “just words.” The person being targeted experiences the entire pattern. They live with the uncertainty of what will happen next, who will be contacted, what will be posted, and whether another part of their life will be disrupted.

Over time, that can make someone feel as though there is no safe place left to go.

Bullying Does Not Always Look Like Bullying

We often picture bullying as one child pushing another child on a playground. It can look like that, but it can also be quieter and much more difficult for others to recognize.

Bullying can include:

• Repeated ridicule or humiliation

• Spreading rumors or false allegations

• Encouraging other people to exclude or turn against someone

• Sharing embarrassing, sensitive, or private information

• Creating fake accounts or impersonating someone online

• Repeatedly monitoring another person’s online activity

• Contacting a person’s friends, relatives, coworkers, school, or employer

• Threatening someone’s reputation, livelihood, relationships, or professional standing

• Using social media to provoke, shame, or intimidate someone

• Continuing unwanted contact after being asked to stop

• Recruiting other people to participate in the behavior

While we typically associate bullying with children and adolescence, it does not end when people graduate. Adults can bully other adults in workplaces, community organizations, professional settings, social groups, and online.

“Adult bullying” may not always be the specific name of a legal claim, but the conduct behind it can still matter legally. Depending on what happened, it may involve harassment, stalking, cyberstalking, defamation, invasion of privacy, intentional infliction of emotional distress, threats, discrimination, or other violations.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that bullying can cause social and emotional distress and is associated with depression, anxiety, self-harm, sleep difficulties, lower academic achievement, and other serious consequences. The CDC also identifies supportive relationships and a sense of connection as protective factors against suicide.

Why Neurodivergent People May Be Especially Affected

For some neurodivergent people, unresolved conflict and unpredictable threats can become all-consuming. A person may replay conversations repeatedly, struggle to disengage from false accusations, or feel compelled to understand why someone is targeting them. Some autistic people are highly rule-governed and deeply affected when facts, policies, or systems are applied inconsistently. Being accused of something they did not do, watching other people ignore clear evidence, or feeling that no authority will respond may be profoundly destabilizing. That is not weakness or oversensitivity. It can be the result of a nervous system trying to find safety in a situation that has become deliberately unpredictable.

Neurodivergent children may also have difficulty identifying bullying, explaining it to an adult, or understanding another person’s hidden intentions. A child may know that something feels wrong but lack the language to describe the pattern. Children and teenagers are especially vulnerable because public humiliation and rejection can feel permanent. When bullying follows a child from school to social media and then into the home through a phone, there may be no place where the child feels completely free from it.

Can Someone Be Held Legally Responsible?

In some circumstances, yes. There is no automatic rule that makes a person legally responsible whenever someone they bullied or harassed later dies by suicide. Courts generally look for evidence connecting the conduct to the psychological harm and the death and whether or not their was knowledge that someone was experiencing suicidal ideation or mental health concerns. The standards also differ depending on the state and whether the case is criminal or civil. Still, there are real cases in which words, coercion, psychological abuse, bullying, and sustained harassment resulted in legal consequences.

In Commonwealth v. Carter, Massachusetts courts upheld Michelle Carter’s involuntary-manslaughter conviction after finding that her repeated pressure and instructions contributed to Conrad Roy’s death. The court found sufficient evidence that her conduct caused his death and rejected the argument that the communications were protected simply because they consisted of words. The facts were unusually direct, including communications during the crisis itself. The case does not mean that every cruel statement is manslaughter, but it does show that words can become part of criminal conduct when intent and causation can be proven.

In another Massachusetts case, Inyoung You pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter after admitting that her escalating verbal, physical, and psychological abuse directly contributed to the death of her boyfriend, Alexander Urtula. Prosecutors documented tens of thousands of messages, including repeated statements telling him to die.

A more recent federal case involved two people who used threatening and humiliating messages to extort a young man with an intellectual disability. The defendants threatened to send false and deeply embarrassing allegations to his employer. The victim died by suicide after fearing that he would lose his job or be arrested. Both defendants pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit cyberstalking and were later sentenced to 41 months and 27 months in federal prison. The sentencing judge specifically considered the victim’s death when describing the seriousness of their conduct.

Federal cyberstalking law covers certain courses of conduct intended to harass or intimidate that cause, attempt to cause, or would reasonably be expected to cause substantial emotional distress. A person does not have to die before cyberstalking can be investigated or prosecuted. The federal statute can be read at 18 U.S.C. § 2261A.

Civil Responsibility Is Possible Too

In Bruno v. Mills, a Rhode Island jury found that a football coach’s conduct toward 15-year-old Nathan Bruno proximately caused Nathan’s suicide. The family alleged that the coach placed sustained pressure on Nathan to identify other students involved in sending harassing messages. Evidence showed that other students were drawn into the pressure campaign and that Nathan felt isolated and cornered. The family presented expert testimony about the psychological effect of the pressure, humiliation, and loss of social connection.

The jury awarded damages to Nathan’s family. In 2025, the trial court rejected the defendants’ request to overturn the verdict or order a new trial, allowing the finding of civil responsibility to stand at that stage of the case. The Rhode Island Superior Court’s decision is available here.

Tennessee law also leaves room for civil responsibility in appropriate cases.

In White v. Lawrence, the Tennessee Supreme Court held that suicide does not automatically break the chain of legal causation. The central question is whether the defendant’s conduct led to the death or made it a reasonably foreseeable result. The decision did not automatically find the defendant liable; it held that causation could be decided at trial rather than dismissed simply because the death was self-inflicted.

Depending on the facts and the jurisdiction, civil claims may involve wrongful death, negligence, intentional infliction of emotional distress, stalking, defamation, invasion of privacy, discrimination, or civil-rights violations.

Bystanders Are Part of the Environment

Bullying rarely exists in a vacuum. It grows when other people laugh, share posts, repeat rumors, provide information about the target, or remain silent because speaking up would be uncomfortable. A bystander may not have started the conduct, but that does not mean their choices have no effect. Refusing to participate, documenting what happened, checking on the targeted person, reporting threats, and correcting false information can interrupt the isolation that bullying is designed to create.

Schools and workplaces also need to look at patterns instead of evaluating each incident as though nothing happened before it. One message may appear insignificant. A series of messages, posts, complaints, rumors, unwanted contacts, and acts of monitoring may tell a very different story.

We Should Not Wait Until Someone Dies

The most important lesson is not that a family might eventually sue or that prosecutors might bring charges. It is that intervention should happen long before a case reaches that point.

A person does not have to die before bullying or harassment matters. They do not have to reach a mental-health crisis before they deserve to be believed. They should not have to prove that they are in danger before other people decide that repeated cruelty has gone too far.

Suicide prevention cannot mean placing the entire burden on the person being harmed. Telling someone to ignore it, stay off social media, be more resilient, or stop letting it bother them does not stop the conduct.

Sometimes prevention means changing the environment around the person. It means interrupting the bullying, preserving evidence, establishing boundaries, involving the appropriate authorities, and holding people responsible before the damage becomes irreversible.

If someone tells us that they feel targeted, watched, humiliated, or hopeless, we should take the pattern seriously. We should help them find safety, support, and a way forward, not because we fear criminal or civil responsibility, but because it's the right thing to do.

If you or someone you know is experiencing suicidal thoughts, emotional distress, or a mental-health crisis, call or text 988. The Suicide & Crisis Lifeline provides free and confidential support 24 hours a day. If someone is in immediate danger, call 911. Tennessee also offers statewide crisis services for adults, children, and youth through 988.

This article provides general educational information and is not legal, medical, or mental health advice.