WARNING:

This is pretty disturbing, so please do not read this if you're feeling fragile ...

Seriously.



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There was a really tragic event here in one of the states further south of me where two teenage girls killed themselves in a pact. I don't wish to go into details here.

Last Sunday night there was a segment on the Australian 60 minutes story where they were talking with the parents of one of the girls and some of the friends in the group that the girls were in at school. The kids at school had figured something was up a long time before the tragedy occurred but they felt they could sort it out and talk about it amongst themselves without telling a counsellor at school or a teacher or a parent. In hindsight of course, the two friends from school that were interviewed said they should have told an adult.

Now I was talking to my daughter about this. She'd already talked to me a bit about what happened with the girls and told me she wanted to see the advertised 60 mins. show to try to understand what had gone on. Well, I forget what happened but she wasn't home so didn't see it. She asked me about it later for more details and I told her what the girls' friends had said and she just looked at me and said "Yeah, right!"... as if to say... no they wouldn't have told anyone. That's what happens. If someone is hurting themselves by cutting or is talking about how bad their life is, they try to work it out amongst themselves and not get anyone else involved, like counsellors or parents etc.. ugh

The girls appeared happy. They both had plans for the future. Everything "appeared" fine... however, when the father went looking online to see where his daughter had been visiting he found some very disturbing things. It was as if his daughter had two lives. The one that she showed to her family and friends and this other one where she sought out information about killing herself online (with her friend obviously) and in her my space diary there was information that showed they'd been openly talking for months about what was going to happen in the end. Lots of goodbyes and sad and dark thoughts. It was all very dark indeed.

So here we had two teenage girls who 'appeared' to be on track and have plans and were busy happy teens doing sport and other activities and involved with family life and had lots of friends and yet in their secret and private thoughts there was something quite different.