My son took his own life after being bullied – I stand by the viral open letter I wrote

It was a weekday morning when I got a call from my son Felix’s school to say he hadn’t arrived.

In that moment I knew, deep in my gut, that something had happened.

After being relentlessly bullied for years, my 17-year-old son had taken his own life. 10 years have now passed – and I miss him desperately every single day.

Felix was the youngest of my three children. He was a very bright, funny, interesting boy, but struggled to find his place in school.

Around age 10, he started to experience low-level bullying – more exclusion than anything else. But by the time he was 13, the bullying was both face-to-face and online.

At school, his games bag would be stolen and shoved in the showers; he’d be excluded in the playground by everyone running away from him. The general consensus was: ‘Everybody hates Felix’.

Online, there were constant unkind things being said about or directly to him: Things like, ‘You’re ugly’; ‘Nobody likes you’; ‘You mustn’t come to this party because if you do, something horrible will happen to you.’

Felix didn’t have his own social media or devices at the time, but he’d use the family computer to seek out a site called Ask.fm, where people could ask anonymous questions, because he’d been told that a lot of stuff was being said about him on there.

By the time he was 14, he had developed OCD. He’d clean obsessively; his hands, his skateboard (if it went outside, he was worried about it bringing dirt in). He also picked at his skin around his throat.

He was very depressed, too. I took him to see a psychotherapist, which did help – but they couldn’t make the problem go away.

We didn’t allow Felix a smartphone until he was 14 or 15. He had a brick phone before that, so we could stay in contact; but a smartphone was just the way things were going at that time. No child of 14 or 15 didn’t have one.

But once teenagers have a smartphone in their pocket, they’ve got the world at their fingertips.

And as a parent, I felt completely powerless.

I could see how much the online world was destroying him, bit by bit. I’d say, ‘Right, no more Internet access’. I’d take away the family iPad and switch off the WiFi at night. But with the best will in the world, once he had a mobile phone, I could barely do anything with that. 

Whenever I did take his phone, he’d say, ‘Why are you punishing me for something that’s being done to me?’. Taking smartphones away just socially isolates teenagers further, because every bit of communication happens online. 

I felt like I was fighting a massive machine.

Felix changed schools after his GCSEs, which was a huge relief. I’d suggested it multiple times before, desperate to get him out of the place where he was so unhappy, but he hadn’t wanted to leave his ‘known’ place.

Once he’d moved schools, I really thought we were past the worst. He had good friends; he was getting on well with his teachers; his reports were good. He seemed happy.

Sometimes he’d talk about his relationships with people – if someone had said something offhandedly on the way to school, he’d worry that they didn’t like him any more. But I thought we could get past that; I thought we were on a steadier setting.

With hindsight, though, I think he’d just started to mask what he was going through more than he had previously. It was only later that I realised how the bullying he’d experienced had damaged him so badly that he couldn’t work out how to negotiate friendships. He was just waiting for it all to go wrong, all the time.

Felix had been at his new school for about seven months by the time he decided to take his own life. 

He left for school that morning in April 2016 – and he never came back.

My life changed forever that day. When I lost my son, I lost a part of myself.

‘Why couldn’t he talk to me?,’ I’d think, desperately. ‘Why couldn’t I save him? Why couldn’t I do my job as a mum?’

My older children were finishing university at the time; and, to be honest, they saved me.

At Felix’s funeral, I spoke about how people needed to understand the impact of their words, especially online – and that, fundamentally, people need to learn how to be kind.

I worked as a sexual health nurse and took six months off, as I just couldn’t work. During those excruciating first few weeks, I’d walk my dog every day with the same words echoing round my head.

I felt very much that Felix had a voice that hadn’t ever been heard; that my son had given me a job to do. I needed to write these words down, so six months after Felix died, I penned my open letter to our local newspaper. It felt very cathartic; I started to process and understand a little better what had happened.

The letter got picked up by national media, which was something I’d never imagined. I had hundreds of letters from other parents saying ‘This is happening to my child as well’, Facebook messages from parents who’d had similar experiences with their children to the one I’d had with Felix, and messages from others empathising with how we’re all trying to get to grips with parenting in this social media age.

I tried to reply where I could; even if it was just to say thank you for sharing your story – but I’ve had very little contact with most of the parents or families of the children who bullied Felix. I think that’s probably a good thing; I don’t know that I would be able to negotiate that.

Now, I work with children’s mental health charity Place2Be, going to schools and speaking with young children about how to use social media safely and how to be kind – both online and offline. I’m utterly committed to supporting children in school – and this support needs to be preemptive, not reactive.

We need to educate children around phone use, for example. Blanket bans don’t particularly work, and the new under-16 ban on social media should not be the end of the conversation. You don’t lose your vulnerabilities on your 16th birthday, and those young people aren’t going to step onto a better, safer platform just because they’ve turned 16.

But it’s not just the Internet. We need to see more action taken by schools when it comes to bullying, and fewer sweeping statements like, ‘We have a zero-tolerance approach’; because what does that actually mean in practice?

In Felix’s case, action may have been taken; but we weren’t kept informed by the school, so we felt like nothing was happening. Families need to be updated, and the bullying needs to be directly addressed – because often, the bullies are the kids who need the most work. We need more psychotherapists in pastoral care roles in schools who can ask, ‘Why are you behaving like this? Why are you excluding this person; what’s the threat to you?’.

And if we start educating kids in primary school about what it means to be kind, and how to be a good friend, that mindset and behaviour will carry through into later life. 

It’s been 10 years since my son died and I still stand by my letter. 

The original words were about our personal situation; now, it would be more general. But it would have the same core message: If we all behave, act and speak with kindness, then we can’t go far wrong.

Felix’s death has forever changed my landscape. I’ve had my hand held constantly by my family and close friends for the last decade, and it will continue to be held. I will never feel complete again. But I feel I have purpose – and I have hope, too. 

And while there’s still breath in my body, I’ll keep fighting to save other families from this sort of tragedy.

As told to Izzie Price

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