Dear future president,

My name is Bella, I am in 10th grade in Baltimore, Maryland. For a while I have felt a lot of inspiration to do something about teen suicide. Last year one of my friends killed herself under the act of bulling. It was much unexpected, she was 15 years old. I later found out from her best friend that she had felt like she couldn’t talk to anyone. Could you imagine how hard that was to go through? This experience made me realize it is one of the toughest losses anyone can ever go through. Nobody should have to go through this pain if it can be prevented.

Suicide is the 3rd leading cause of death for 15-24 year olds acording to kidshealth.org.  Each year 15% of youth receive treatment for self-inflicted wounds and that for every 100,000, 18 teens succeed according to cdc.gov. Families are being torn apart, friends are left feeling responsible, and schools don’t know what to do. Future President did you know that there is something you must do about this?

There are a lot of reasons why teens feel depressed, it’s a lot of pressure to be a teen today. I know from personal experience that constantly worrying about the way that I look and if people like me, I change the way I look and I change the way I act because I worry if people will think I’m weird. Isn’t being a teen supposed to be a journey on how to find yourself? How is that supposed to work when society is forcing us to feel like we must be a certain way? You can help change that. I can’t stress it enough how much it pains me to know that KIDS who have only just started their life go home thinking it was time for it to be over just because someone said something to put them down. Teens are also depressed for reasons we can’t always save the young mind from family death, family abuse, physical Abuse, bullying, sexual abuse, drugs.

Future President, we don’t always know what is going on in someone’s home life and we may not always know if someone is depressed and losing hope, We can’t prevent that, but we can stop it before it’s too late. What I’m asking you to do is help me educate people that they are not going through this alone. Not all schools have a guidance counselor, with someone to talk to. We need to make sure every student realizes how serious this actually is. If there is even a chance at us changing the teen suicide statistics don’t you think we should change it? I can only remember one time in my whole life that I have talked about teen suicide in school. Everyone always says how great someone was after they died but what about saying it before its too late.