Now I am a person who will definitely say, don't like it? don't read it then. But to be perfectly honest what is with all of the teen suicide and and dying lately?
What kind of message does this send to our young ones?
I can tell you after this little rant session, I will probably go and read all of these books because yes, they do sound interesting. But I am 18, technically an adult and I understand the repercussions of taking ones own life as I have tried to do so. But when you are 13, 14, 15 and reading novel after novel about teens taking the easy way out and their friends moving on and getting over it and everything being all lovey dovey happy happy, that isn't the real world, and I'm worried that young people won't understand that.
I am usually the person that looks down on rant sessions like this because it is up to the reader to decide what is appropriate, but coming from a self-destructive background and seeing influences like this worry me.Keep in mind that I am NOT condemning the authors or publishers as these are excellent books about a tough subject. I am also not saying that young people should not read them. What I am trying to say is that when people do read them, please don't take the subject lightly because once that path is taken, there is no going back and people don't recover quickly and move on, it continues to hurt for a long time afterwards.
After a few comments I have noticed that people are focusing on the fact that I said "young people" more than the fact of the original topic. This was not to condemn young people. Yes there are some 13 yr olds who are more mature than others, there are some 14 yr olds who have lost people and 15 yr olds who understand and have even felt depression. But how many of those are out there, really. What percentage do the "some"'s make up? Not much. Most kids are still just kids, who read books for the fun of it and like to swap with their friends on the weekends. Not everyone comes from a harsh or mature background, not everyone understands.
I will give you an example of who this post was for. A girl, 14 years old, sees that her friend, who is a cutter receives attention from her peers to try and help her out of this situation which she no longer wants to be in, so the girl also goes and cuts herself deliberately waves her mangled arm in front of all her classmates faces so that they will also run to her aid. One of her peers points out that most usual self-cutters try to hide what they do, so the girl then invents a story about having a harsh home-life, parents hitting her and not feeding her, telling her that she is fat and ugly. One of her friends knows the family, her mother is friends with the girls mother, she knows that the home abuse is not real. Then the girl starts talking of suicide, how she can no longer go on, how she can't see where her life is taking her or why she has to go on. She works at a child care centre now.
This girl, this attention seeker, made light of these situations so that she would have the most people come running when she shed a tear. She didn't take into consideration the self-mutilator who recently tattooed her body to cover the scars she left on herself, she didn't take into consideration the boy who would come to school with bruises on his ribs and at one time a broken finger because his parents beat him every night, she didn't take into consideration the guy whose depression was so bad, he became an alcoholic at 13 years old and would drink himself to sleep most nights, and she didn't take into consideration the person who was suicidal or the person that had lost a sister to suicide.
That girl, those people, that situation were all real. That girl who had no understanding of the situations she was pretending to be in didn't realise how bad they really were, didn't realise how much she was hurting those around her who had to feel this pain everyday.
Those are the type of people this post was aimed at, not the minority of people who understand depression and suicide. And if there really are that many young people who have been through depression and have been suicidal. Then really, that is just sad.
