Opinion: Good intentions can't protect our teens from bullies

[Revan]

An interesting opinion piece of Jamie Hubley's suicide >_> Please note: Rage may insue

Opinion: Good intentions can

When a community is faced with a tragic event like the suicide of 15-year-old Jamie Hubley, the natural response is to lay blame and to take action to make sure it never happens again. Sadly, both those responses will ultimately prove futile.

Some are eager to blame Jamie’s school or those who bullied him, but bullying in itself does not lead straight to suicide. Many are bullied. Few take their own lives. Only Jamie himself knew the real combination of reasons behind his decision to end his life.

Committing suicide is a deeply personal decision, and one that is unique to the individual. Fundamentally, it’s an assessment that life has simply become unbearable, that the bad has outweighed the good. Jamie’s blog post summarized it well. “It’s just too hard. I don’t want to wait three more years, this hurts too much. How do you even know it will get better? It’s not.”

[djt820]

He's about half-right.

[Beachboi92]

this author is sorta right and sorta a fucking idiot. He puts way to much responsibility on the teen committing suicide and not enough on the society that created the bullies and the kid who was in a position to commit suicide. just a douche behind a computer writing about how things wont change while other people take actions to make a difference.

[Hot Pink]

Did the author stop to think about why Jamie's life was so hard that he decided to end it? It was because he was being relentlessly bullied. It seems like the author's real message is for homosexual teenagers to stay in the closet or risk suicide. And you know what? The reason the closet exists in the first place? A fear of being bullied. I think the author really didn't think his case through before he presented it.

[Mogget]

The author's making a more subtle case than that. He's saying that some people are always going to be bullied, and that Jamie's being gay was just an excuse people used to bully him. If he hadn't been gay they'd've either bullied him for some other reason, or bullied someone else for some other reason.

[fairyfleet]

I thought the author was sympathetic, but also brutally realistic. Then again, I'm a pessimist.
Hopefully one day all of this will change though, and homophobic comments and bullying wont be accepted or thought of an inevitable.

[sokk]

He was a f***ing teenager! Teenagers are vulnerable, and so what is bullying was only ONE of the reasons?! does it matter? His life was hell, and bullying played a huge part of that. We need to do something about bullying. Yes, Jamie probably had other issues too, but it seems to me that a lot of those issues came directly or indirectly from the bullying, like he asked why nobody could love him, and why he couldn't get a boyfriend.. that looks like low self esteem to me, and that is a consequence of the bullying and being picked on every frikkin day. Maybe it lead to his depression, or maybe made his depression worse.

My point is that.. does it matter what caused Jamie's suicide in the end? we all know he was bullied, and he lived a very unhappy life. Why can't we just try to stop bullying and prevent this from ever happening again in the future instead of asking questions what really caused his death? It's disrespectful and frankly, it doesn't matter at this time. What matters is that we should try to better the lives of teenagers, so this never happens again, the bullying needs to stop, end of. We need a zero tolerance policy.