Editorial: When a tragic end is seen as the only solution

The modern world has produced infinitely more sinister ways to engage in denigrating, diminishing and humiliating others, leaving our children incredibly vulnerable, writes the editor.

The grim toll continues to grow as young Queenslanders, with everything to live for, end their own lives as a result of school bullying.

In a special report in The Courier-Mail today we reveal how a 13-year-old who told a psychologist she wanted to kill herself was sent home by Logan Hospital’s mental health unit.

Three weeks later she was dead.

Her name was Onyx Rose Lambert and she suicided on July 16 after years of school torment.

Her family still believes she might be alive today if she had been admitted and received psychiatric care.

Our journalism reveals that there has been a 50 per cent surge in the number of desperate young people seeking help from a Brisbane specialist mental health unit in the past year.

Mater Emotional Health Unit, based at the hospital’s South Brisbane campus, is seeing only a fraction of the kids, some of whom are waiting 18 months to see a psychiatrist – a clearly unacceptable time frame.

Onyx Rose suicided after being bullied at school. Picture: Facebook.

School bullying has been with us since schools were created but the modern world has produced infinitely more sinister ways to engage in denigrating, diminishing and humiliating fellow human beings in their more vulnerable stages of development.

The cruel Facebook and Twitter posts will no doubt continue but added to them are manipulated photographs and rapidly developing AI technology that can make it so easy to create a visual taunt.

Health Minister Shannon Fentiman and Education Minister Grace Grace say that one suicide is too much and they will continue to put their heads together to work on solutions.

Yet the heartache shows no signs of abating.

There are credible studies, including one released last year by McAfee, surveying more than 15,000 parents and 12,000 children, which revealed up to one in four kids suffers cyber-bullying.

That puts Australia as one of the worst nations in the world for cyber-bullying.

That survey also uncovered a worrying number of parents who simply did not know their child was experiencing bullying.

This newspaper was reporting on school bullying even before the death of Amy “Dolly’’ Everett who took her own life in 2018 after being bullied, and whose family has worked hard at bringing this issue to the forefront of public discussion.

The death of Onyx Rose Lambert, along with that of Lilly Osborne in November last year, was covered extensively and prominently by The Courier-Mail in a front page story in July.

As these tragedies arise we will both report upon them and examine ways to correct this development which was one of the unknowable, and certainly unintended, consequences of the technological revolution.

It is those youths who feel they have no one to turn to who are clearly most vulnerable when the normal pains and confusions of the teenage years turn truly sinister, and ending your own life appears not as a tragedy but a solution.