YATW Blog Post #1: Bullying, Depression, and Suicide

Hi there! My name is Ebony Ream. For my Freshman English class, we are to choose a world issue that we feel strongly passionate about. There are different parts to this project. The first part is the research. The other one is actually going out into the world and taking action to help fix it.

My issue is surrounding bullying and its outcomes, specifically depression and suicide. Why? Well, in my experience I used to be bullied because of my weight and being a “teachers pet.” However, it has stopped and I have been able to get through it. My little sister is currently a victim of cyber bullying. Everyday, she would get dirty and nasty text messages from girls she used to call her “friends.” Those messages used to bring her down every single day and night. As her older sister, it hurts to see someone you love, go into the state of depression; exactly being  the reason why I feel that this is a huge issue to not only my family and community, but in the world.Thankfully, my little sister has gotten better each day and is still improving today. Unfortunately, there are many young kids that I know that aren't really able to and the outcomes are tragic.

In the picture, it looks like the girl is around the ages of 10-12. She’s in very deep thought with a very blank and empty face. It seems as if she’s been unhappy for a long period of time.

The causes of most kids’ and teens’ depression mode is no other than bullying itself. There are many types of bullying. Some of the major ones are school, cyber, neglecting, etc. All of which are either physically or mentally. According to this website I cited, girls between the ages of 10-14 are more likely to be targets of bullying resulting suicide.

The information provided on this website, shows how kids in younger ages will more likely grow up into self harming, as a sign of depression. If you take the time to read the information from the website, it offers other resources leading more deeply on depression and the symptoms and signs of how you know that your child is depressed.

Instead of just researching information using articles or pictures, I decided to also watch videos about real life happenings and felt that these three were the best out of the many that I watched.

• Stand up for Change is a mini video about how you should speak out if you see something that should be changed. Neglecting is a type of bullying that also causes depression. In the video, a boy is being neglected by one of his friends, whenever he’s around a group of “cool” kids. The boy turns into his depression state, and finally decided to take his life away.

• STRAIN is a mini video showing a real life scenario of how two best friends are broken up because one decides to join “the cool girls” team. That is what exactly happens in this video. So, there are two best friends and one decides to start hanging out with the popular girls. From what I see, they seem to be pressuring her to stop being friends with her best friends, and so she did because she wanted to be part of their “crew” or “cliche.” That made the friend feel depressed because not only have the friend been ignoring her, but the popular girls have been bullying her and hurting her physically. In the end, she ended up killing herself by overdosing on pills, the night of their school prom.

• Cyber Bullying Virus is a video basically explaining how cyber bullying works and how fast it could spread because of all the access to technology. I wanted to aware people of how cyber bullying works and the results of it because cyber bullying is one of the major and main bullying.

Another thing I would like to focus on are these two graphs right now: (Click here for further information)

Just by looking at the graphs, there are major differences in the heights of the bars. According to these graphs, high school students have a lower enrollment than the elementary but that could vary whether it is the amount of kids in each grade. However, if paying attention to the years of the elementary chart, between the years of 2009-2010 the total amount of kids would be 325, but after that, the numbers started decreasing.The same thing goes with the high school information. Seeing that from 2010-2011 the total is 331, but between 2011-2012, the rating decreased rapidly to 297 total. The school board suggested that the causes for this may be bullying.

Click here for the link to my bibliography.