Bullying Escolar e Comportamento Suicida na Adolescência: Uma Análise de Materiais Jornalísticos

Abstract

The recurrence of practices involving humiliation, exclusion, or aggression can intensify psychological suffering and contribute to the development of mental illness. It is within this procedural and cumulative movement that bullying is inscribed, thus constituting a risk of suicidal behavior. Beyond the impacts on mental health, it is observed that the effects of bullying manifest themselves in the context of social relationships and in the school trajectory. These impacts impaired social interaction and school attendance, manifested by social withdrawal and learning difficulties. Considering these aspects, the object of this research is school bullying and suicidal behavior in adolescence, aiming to understand the social representations associated with these phenomena and highlighting the limitations of media discourses. These discourses are frequently permeated by reductionism or an emphasis on sensationalist aspects, which can influence both public perception and the formulation of educational policies aimed at preventing violence and suicide among adolescents. For the analysis of the collected data, we opted for content analysis. From a methodological point of view, this study employed a qualitative approach based on the content analysis of journalistic materials published between 2017 and 2025. The corpus consists of five cases selected according to previously defined criteria: bullying in a school context linked to attempted or completed suicide, originating from the news outlets Campo Grande News, Revista Piauí, R7, Brasil 247 and CGN. The results show that the place of suicide in journalistic narratives is determined not only by objective facts but also by the framing chosen by the media and the disputes over meaning surrounding each case. Depending on the context, the same phenomenon can be treated as an individual psychological problem, an institutional failure, an issue of peer violence, or a result of structural inequalities. It can be concluded that the media plays a significant role in constructing the meanings attributed to bullying and suicide, sometimes broadening their understanding as a social phenomenon and, at other times, reducing them to individual or circumstantial episodes.