Bullies Drove My Son To His Death | This Morning

so it was in 2009 when he was 10 that this torment began what was the first incident you became aware of it was it was small things I mean I know a lot has been made in the papers about him playing not being able to play a video game that was that was one small incident it was just little incidences of unkindness little comments about you know why didn't he have this or why didn't he have that not being invited to a party it was more exclusion than anything else and we had a few issues when he was in the last year of junior school and you know I thought when he had two senior school it would settle and you know new school year new people and it just started to escalate and he started to become more and more when you look at those pictures of him you can't see what it was that would have triggered that he's such a good-looking yes yeah always cool he never saw that he never saw that he thought that's why he only ever smiled for family pictures on his Facebook page and thinks he would never smile cuz he said I'm really ugly with a smile he never saw it he could never hit me always still he would you think he was vulnerable to it sensitive to it and the stuff possibly because he reacted to it rather than you he couldn't he couldn't dismiss it he would come home and he would be sad um he at school they were said well you know I can't see a problem because he's always got a smile on his face because he held that smile and he performed all day at school and it was only when he came home that he would cry yeah but you know a lot of peope people I think didn't realize the impact of what was happening to him because he just kept that fixed grin and he performed and he was the class clown and he got into trouble because he was the class clown and the problem is in that's also finding about this is that there there's no big incident worker with this stuff this is terrible or you can go report this to the teacher it's the small little tiny things over a time like a row seven cuts oh absolutely absolutely and it just became progressively worse so how did it get progressively worse he his self-confidence his self-esteem just was eroded on a daily basis um he was he was called a name by somebody every day probably not the same person probably quite often the first time that person might have said anything but it might have been the fifth time he'd heard it that day he was alone at lunch times he was alone at weekends his social life with his it was you know our family and you know as you become a teenager you know you like your family but you don't want to spend all the time with them and he just he was excluded and if he made a friends outside it wouldn't be long before they'd get a text message or a Facebook message saying would wanna be friends with him for he's the most hated boy in the school and so it seemed almost that it became for no good reason fashionable to dislike him it was just who he was it was I've always said this you know you know was almost like an introduction of this is so-and-so she plays netball this is Freire this is Felix everyone hates Felix and it was just who he was and of course with the social media and and that becoming into his life it wasn't even like he could just leave it at the school gate this was now in his home in his bedroom yeah in his pocket yeah well we we tried to stop it being so much in the home but that just excludes and isolates even more because his generation not so much with older children but I think his his year group particularly that's the only way they communicate they're not very good at communicating face-to-face it's all done over group chats and so on and so forth and if we took it away I mean we didn't let him take his phone to his bedroom or the computers or iPads or anything the bedrooms all kept centrally downstairs but if you're looking for negativity that's all you're gonna find and he would sneak down and he'd look and he'd find things about himself did he talk to you about it yeah he talked a lot we were actually very very close um and it got to the stage when he was about 14 that actually it was a really good girl friend of mine who serves psychotherapist who said done get him some help and I helped he be he was he needed it and he admitted he said I can't do this so he saw a psychotherapist for about a year and she did give him some coping strategies but if you're not solving the problem you're just throwing them back into it and he wouldn't he wouldn't change schools because he said it's social media it'll go with me wherever and why would you put me somewhere where I don't even know anyone or how anything functions I'd be even more scared but then in about the last two years he didn't share as much and I I wasn't as aware that it was still going on to the same extent but I don't think it was to the same extent but it was still going but it Annotated had already started to burn oh he was damaged by then he I knew when he went to his new school he made friends they were lovely people they're really nice people nice teachers but he he couldn't he didn't know how to have a friendship because he'd never had one and if somebody didn't speak to him or turn their back to him it'd be oh it's starting again it's starting again and he would he'd be Moody at times but he'd normalized it for himself and I don't want to dwell too much on on the day when he took his own life and that that morning and he went he was meant to be getting the the bus to school and he and he didn't go and we went to be catching the train and he didn't get to school and the school called me and said that somebody had seen him getting off a bus in a local village and I knew that he knew some people in that village so I thought that could he he'd been upset I thought maybe he'd gone to speak to this friend he had there so we went to look for him

Channel: This Morning

Views: 156,557

Keywords: celebrity interviews, celebrity gossip, tv news, soap news, holly willoughby, real stories, phillip schofield, this morning, ruth langsford, eamonn holmes, morning show, breakfast tv, bullies, bullying, Lucy Alexander, suicide, part 1, emotional, felix, son

Id: OkDAdNFyRxo

Length: 6min 13sec (373 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 06 2016