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It's hard to put down on paper or in this case on computer screen the effect of bullying and harrassment have effected me. I am twenty years old and there is hardly a day that goes by where I don't feel the after effects. Bullying and Harrassment are a rising problem in our society. It went from the accepted norm that everyone has to deal with to children who are so terrified of going to school that they try by any means to avoid it and make the pain go away. Unfortunately the method they seek is often suicide.

But back to my story, I moved to Vermont in 1996. I had a comfortable life living in Northern New York, my family was fairly well known and respected. But moving to Vermont was like moving to another planet. I was the new kid and I imagine that everyone knows how that feels. I didn't really know anyone and I didn't make friends that easily. I was an extremely insecure person and this stood out to those who made me into a target. Now another thing that needs to be known is that even from a young age I was extremely intelligent. My interest far surpassed those of my peers and I related to adults better than those my own age. Because of my advanced interests which were at the time the Sinking of the RMS Titanic and the American Civil War, theses things only compounded my social awkwardness. I can remember many of my peers asking me stupid questions like when was the "war of 1854" and so on. For many years I would come home and tell my parents the various insults and personal incidents that happened to me.

My parents did their best to deal with the situation, they complained to the school but most of the time all they got were lip service and empty promises. When I entered the sixth grade I was a emotional train wreck. I felt like my body was a pressure cooker and that at any moment I would explode. It's rather sad that a twelve year old had to feel that way. One individual made it his absolute delight in tormenting me day after day after day. Usually on any particular subject from my clothes to my interests. And my parents had to endure the samething each day their son coming home and explaining what had happened to me. The abuse most verbal and not physical lead me to seek out negative attention. For that was the only I knew and had a desire for. The policy of the school I had attended was that the teachers had to catch those who tormented me in the act of doing so although I got the reputation of being a tattle tale since I came to my teachers daily complaining of the various things my fellow students would do to me. A few other things fed this pain in me, first of them being whenever I was on a sports team whether in was little league or flag football they became mired in the politics. Since I wasn't born in Vermont my family was viewed as outsiders and this frequently trickled into the sports I was playing. My parents practically had to beg my coaches to work on improving my atheletic abilities but I just wanted to play for the fun of it. The other thing is too personal to reveal.

Well the day came when the pressure cooker exploded. I don't know what set it off and I still cannot remember that day very well. But the years of abuse finally came out, I said I wanted to commit suicide and that my life was a living hell. My councilers rushed to put an end to the abuse but it was too little to late. The damage this individual had caused left scars in me for a very long time. Personally I never liked the way the school handled the situation. They moved the student into a straight 6th through 8th grade group since I was in a multi-age group with kids from the ages of 11-14. The pain never really went away and even when I was in high school it remained. Although my life did eventually get better as I joined after school groups that help me piece together my self-worth and confidence. But as I said the damage was always under the surface, if you could take my soul out of my body and look at it you would see alot of repairs I have had to make. I did seek professional help and for awhile took medication to deal with my depression. But these things never really helped but dull the pain. My final year in high school was a time in my life in which I had a hard time trying to figure out what to do. Of course any major transition like that would cause anyone to be stressed out but given my background and emotional instability it only compounded the situation. After I graduated it felt like a massive weight had been lifted from me. No doubt it brought a sense of peace to me for the first time in many years. But even still I felt depressed and occasionally had suicidial thoughts. But one day I said to myself that I was sick and tired of feeling this way and that it wasn't all my fault. I did accept the fact that I went looking for some of the attention I recieved but most of it wasn't deserved.

Now that I have had a few years to reflect on all of this I will tell you some of the things that have come about from it.

1. I now have an extremely hard shell when it comes to insults or personal slights that people say to me. They don't bother me anymore and I usually regard those saying they not worth my time and that they are idiots.
2. I can be on occasion an extremely jaded person and this comes out on issues I feel strongly about.
3. My faith in God for what little there was before is effectively gone. I am now an atheist.
4. I have found new enjoyment in other activities that I never really thought I would enjoy such as horse back riding which I find very therapeutic.
5. I still on occasion have a hard time allowing myself to feel things. When I do I have panic attacks.
6. I can make new friends alot easier than I used to be able to know that I am in college.
7. I found usefull ways to deal with my emotions by writing in a journal or taking time just to chill out with no stressful things bothering me.

The reason I have shared this is because many of the members of this site have gone through or are going through some type of harrassment. My message for you is never give up hope that things will get better and if you feel that you want to kill yourself stop and think about how your death will impact those that love you whether your family or your friends here or in the real world. Seek help, you are not alone. Never ever give up. Keep fighting.

Thanks for letting me share my this bit of my life with you.

There is a topic for this. ever-been-teased-t30627.html

I was already aware of that however this is my experience in dealing with it and I felt that it could be useful to someone going through the same stuff I went through.

so you think mods from Balto Source have caused people to put a gun to their head and blow their brains out?


Just want to make sure.

Why would you assume that? Or say that? I can tell you strait forward that has NEVER happened.... I may be on the staff, but I am in no way a bully. You can call me one all you want; I don't care.

I'm sorry if this comes across as incredibly rude, but I have never before seen such an ignorant response to anything, ever before, so I am going to make a few things perfectly clear to you as I am insulted, not only on my own behalf, but also on the behalf of those with genuine issues (and there was I time where I too was in a depression to the point where I turned suicidal - in fact, I tried to take my life several times).

I'm going to be completely blunt with you: You are stupid to as much as "assuming" that anyone besides the person himself have "blood on their hands" if he does succeed in killing himself. If you want to know the truth, it is that putting the blame on others is simply creating a scapegoat which can be used to relieve your own guilt. The only one at fault for a suicide is the deceased, and you had better learn to understand that.

We are all in charge of our own actions and we all make our own choices. If I were about to rob a bank and convinced you to help me do it and we were caught and tried for it, saying "But he convinced me to do so" is not a valid defence.
YOU made a CHOICE to help me; if I convinced you, that wouldn't be my problem because when all comes down to it, you CHOSE to help me. Under no circumstance did I FORCE you in any way. Thus, I could not be blamed for YOUR actions.

If you killed someone with a car by accident, that WOULD be your fault. You were DRIVING the car, thus it's YOUR responsibility not to injure someone. And though society requires of us to be easier on those who have been in accidents, you will still be punished for it. "But it was an accident-" won't hold.
Now, if the victim (the deceased) had THROWN himself in front of your car, that would be HIS fault, as he made a CHOICE to throw himself in front of your car. If you, in trial, had managed to prove that, you would be released. It's not your fault that he chose to get in the way. Just as you have the responsibility of not driving over any pedestrians, he has a responsibility of not throwing himself in front of moving cars. By breaking his responsibility, he became the one to blame because you were a responsible driver. If he hadn't done that and you ran over him, you would have broken YOUR responsibility, thus you're at fault.


This is true for suicide as well. Suicide is an effect, which means there must be a cause. But suicide is also a choice-- heck, the very DEFINITION of suicide is to "willingly take one's own life", and since suicide is a choice, the cause cannot be blamed. They can be condemned because that is what society requires of its peers, but the cause holds no real blame in the matter.
In order for you to make a statement like the one you made, you must understand exactly what it is you're talking about and I am sorry to say that you have no clue.


Using myself as an example, I grew up with bullying, spending 10 miserable years as a harrassed victim. That too drove me over the edge and in the belief that there was no other solution and that I was worth nothing, I tied a rope around my neck, walked out into the lawn with a chair and tried to hang myself. And I tried and failed 3 times before I broke down and my parents found me there in tears the next morning, the rope still around my neck.
So, who were the ones who tries to kill me? The bullies? The teachers? The school? The crazy old cat lady next door?
None of them. My unsuccessful murderer was... myself. I chose to try and take my life because I believed there was no other way. And what was the trigger? It was a single word spoken to me at school that day: "loser".

But here I am; there was another way. The scars of the past still linger, but they are healing. I am happy; I've a beautiful girlfriend whom I love more than anything else in the world, I am aspiring to live my dream of becoming a film-composer, I'm enjoying my hobbies and a silent, peaceful life in a small town of 500 people on the mountainside. I tried to take the easy way out because I didn't know of anything else, and that was my choice. Looking back, I dread to think that I could have been successful and the feeling it gives me has made me vomit more than once.

The night I tried to kill myself I realized one thing: death was not something I wanted to experience. My life sucked, yes, but I was going to man up and face it like Hercules faced the Hydra (those were my thoughts exactly). It looked like an impossible struggle, but I won.


Anything can trigger a suicidal person to try and take their life, be it a mere word or seeing someone else smile-- we don't know what triggers it and we can't put the blame on anyone. I don't blame the bullies who harrassed me, because they were not the ones who tried to take my life. And to assume that a moderator of this website (or anyone else, for that matter) is guilty of making a person kill himself is outright ridiculous. Not only is "I'm going to kill myself if you don't unban me" one of the more common things they hear when they ban someone, it's also a sure sign that they are NOT going to kill themselves, as people who ARE suicidal will not let anyone know that they are going to take their lives. They will do their best to hide it so that noone can stop them.

Ultimately, life is too short to hate and we should stop trying to blame other people for the actions of some. Those who HAVE killed themselves have no sympathy from me; I am living proof that suicide is just an easy way out of a situation that could've been solved by staying alive. They chose to take their life and whether or not I agree with them is irrelevant. Had I been the trigger or even the cause of a suicide, yes I would feel bad about it, but ultimately it boils down to the fact that I was not the one who killed that person. I would regret so for my entire life, but I wouldn't lose much sleep over the suicide.

The deceased deserve no sympathy; only the living do, because unlike the living, the deceased cannot ever be saved.

Even if a moderator truly were the cause or trigger of a suicide, that moderator does not have the blood of anyone on their hands. They did not kill anyone-- they did something bad, but they never murdered anybody.

In fact, I can safely attest to the fact that we do quite the opposite and during my time as a moderator I have more than once established real-life contact with "suicidal" members of AnimationSource who did make threats of suicide. I did because even though I can almost guarantee such threats are empty I still value human lives. Not once did these threats turn out to be real, or so I thought until I happened to prevent a suicide from happening by calling a member's parents (from NORWAY and it cost me a fortune too) to let them know what this member said on the shoutbox. The next I hear in the phone when the parents go into their daughter's room to check on her is screams of "Oh my god!" and general panic. I'd been just in time.

And even today, another moderator of this website has established a stable RL connection with yet another genuinely suicidal member.


Therefore I am INSULTED that you can make such an incredibly ignorant and arrogant statement and frankly, I hope you are warned or preferably banned for that. You know NOTHING about what goes on behind the scenes, you are fantastically misinformed to assume that a suicide is anyone but the deceased's fault and you have likely succeeded in becoming a very hated person for many.

If we stay under the impression that suicide is the fault of someone else but the one who committed it, we will never be able help the suicidal who are still alive. By blaming someone else you are taking your focus away from the person who desperately needs it and instead try and criminalize someone else. Ultimately this will not help person who, in fact, needs help more than their parents' or friends' "revenge". Being suicidal is a cry for help, and there are better ways to help a person than wasting energy on playing "guess who's at fault" until the person kills himself. That energy MUST be focused on the person.



In the famous words of Willy Wonka: "You lose! Good day, sir!"









Ahura: Thank you very much for sharing your story with us. It's very inspiring and could ignite a spark of light in the darkness for those who might be thinking that suicide is the only way out. It is yet another proof that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, and that no matter how dark the night is, the sun will always rise.

What he said. ^

I notice that that particular sentence, Kiko, came from you talking about people on this site who happen to be gay.
I don't know how many times all mods here have had to explain about that rule.
I know of plenty of people on this site who are and don't have a problem.

There's not a lot else I can actually say that Lux didn't cover; his response is win.


Ahura: Thanks for the topic. Despite the fact I've been avoiding it because of my own experiences, which I don't like going back to, it's a good topic and will make people think.

I hope this topic will help anyone who is either seriously thinking about commiting suicide or those attempting it to think about what they are doing.

I must say this topic has actually inspired me. I wish this topic came for me when I was in a time of crisis and had many suicide thoughts, as a matter of fact. Would you care to read my story?
I've typed this up on another site, and being that it was posted on a forum section for more "mature" members and this could actually offend some people I'm going to put this as a hidden text, so if anyone chooses to read this it's on your own will.
P.S. I put the text size to large because it appeared too small on the normal size as a hidden text. :>

Hidden text : click to show

If you would like a link to the forum topic I've posted this on here's the link:
Hidden text : click to show

Wow. This is exactly how I feel. Right down to the negative attention and everything. I never knew someone could understand something like that, almost exactly... But even though I get constantly teased, I've never thought seriously about suicide. Maybe because I'm so young (I'm currently 13). But it's still awful to deal with. It makes me depressed about myself, and even though I try to make it so that it doesn't bother me, it still hurts inside. I tend to hide it very well, but at times, I just can't take it anymore. Once, I cried for 3 hours (in my room of course, since I refuse to let others see me cry) just because I kept feeling unaccepted, left out, and just teased to my breaking point.

But hopefully, the mental scars will heal. You can never be sure, but it's worth hoping for...

If it's so bad then why dont you just leave Kiko, seriously.
Grammar and BS fans everywhere would thank you.

please stick to the topic