Recently someone asked me what I thought was the unique message in my book titled “A Life Interrupted – the Story of My Battle with Bullying and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder”. The following was my response:
The key message in this book is the fact that bullying can have long lasting devastating impact on young people. There are numerous individuals out there like me who have been lucky enough not to have committed suicide, but have had extremely difficult lives because of bullying. The unique characteristics of this book include the following:
- It provides details on how prolonged bullying can trigger devastating mental illness that can ruin a person’s life;
- It describes several characteristics about this disease (onset, diagnosis, treatment, etc) that will be extremely helpful for all parents as well as for all mental health professionals;
- It demonstrates impact of PTSD from bullying and how it manifested itself within the disease;
- It encourages OCD and other mental health sufferers to open up and accept treatment.
- It encourages millions of minorities in the United States to open up and address similar issues
- It sheds some light on why bullies do what they do (I have a description in my book about a confrontation I had with a past bully)
- It demonstrates how bullying can torment a victim long after the school years are over.