*Update for further clarification added below
You won't like what I'm about to say. It's controversial, it's straightforward, it's the dialogue we should be having instead of having pity. Another day, another suicide from bullying. It's parents fault, it's the school's fault and we all take sorrow in a child/teen dead.
Every time we glamorize the suicides (most notably from bullying lately) we are telling kids, "Aw, poor thing, I'm going to give you the recognition and sorrow you should have gotten in your life". Kids on the edge are being pushed over by the notion that they'll get famous, in my truly honest not-so-humble opinion. Even a decade ago, suicide was shameful. Not to mention two, three or four decades ago. I experienced the full realm of bullying from having my homework stolen out of my hand and no teacher willing to listen, to being thrown from my desk (or it toppled with me in it), hair pulled, spit on because I was a heavy girl (not even obese at the time, just not a stick), because I refused to go anorexic, a double whammy in wearing glasses, a triple whammy in being poor and a quadruple whammy in having a messed up family. I was taunted, teased, physically harmed, every day of my school life until I got so fed up (even with my straight A's) that I stopped going overall. Parents even hated me because I addressed them as Mr. and Mrs., which they felt was trying to suck up to them. The early boyfriends I did have ended up dumping me sometimes because of the pressure they faced from peers taunting them about being with the fat, ugly chick.
