Amanda Todd.

Bullied to death. Beat up and left in a ditch until her dad came and took her home. Blackmailed by an anonymous user on the Internet, and then taunted on Facebook. At age 12 she was a happy, outgoing young girl. Four years later, depressed and anxious, she started turning to drugs, alcohol and cutting herself, wishing to free her mind from the pain she had been experiencing at school and after school. When it all became too much for her, she posted a YouTube video describing to the world this hell she had been living in, pleading for a person to help her through these tough times. About a month later, she took her own life.

How could this beautiful young woman become so depressed into believing that her life didn’t matter? How could this outgoing, talented girl submit to the horrors around her; feeling so helpless and hated that she did not wish to keep living?

It all started on the Internet.

When Amanda Todd was in middle school, she was conned into exposing her breasts to a 30-year-old man. Soon this became more than a one time thing. After she attempted to back out from his persistent demands, he threatened to post the topless photos of her on Facebook, revealing it to all of her friends. Thinking that if she ignored it he would leave her alone, she declined his requests to “put on a show” for him. Unfortunately, this anonymous 30-year-old man kept his word, and soon these uncensored photos were being shown to the world. In her YouTube video prior to her death she says, "I can never get that photo back... It’s out there forever."

It became a living hell for Amanda. After changing schools for the second time since she had become the target of this bullying, she had sex with a guy, thinking this mutual attraction was something real.

Big mistake.

His girlfriend, having heard of this affair, gathered up a bunch of her friends and beat her up, leaving her in a ditch to be found and brought home by her father. No teachers or friends to help her out.

Nothing.

She went home that day and drank bleach. The torture, so efficacious and disgustingly successful, she attempted to kill herself. Changing schools for the third time, Amanda tried hard to escape the torture she had been pulled into.

But the Internet followed her.

Getting tagged in photos on Facebook as “Porn Star,” she lost any hope that might have been lingering in her heart that things would ever get better, and so she ended her own life. One month before her 16th birthday.

In an interview with Amanda’s father he opens up about his daughter’s video, “She told me why she made it — she wanted to send a message out so that it wouldn’t happen to someone else, so no one would have to go through what she went through. . . . No matter how many haters there are out there, they can’t hurt her now and her message can keep on going strong. That gives me some peace.”

Dr. Louann Brizendine, clinician, researcher, and author of the best-selling book The Female Brain, speaks out about humiliation and rejection effecting teen girls in an interview for the Vancouver Sun. “Reward centers in the brain are stimulated by social interaction and approval... That social circuitry is really intensely activated, especially in teen girl brains.”

“All of a sudden, the peer group is everything,” she continues. “And if there’s bullying and the peer group seems to turn on the teen, they feel isolated. They truly feel their life is over... If you have social isolation or you are being rejected or you’re being bullied, that whole area of your brain... goes dark, and it can throw some people into a suicidal depression.”

The Internet, when used without caution, can be extremely dangerous. Teens are often pressured into looking and acting a certain way, and often portray themselves, online, as someone other than who they really are. And the worst part about it... no matter how many times you stick up for yourself and face the bullying head on, to be put down yet again... no matter how far away in miles you run from the torture, the sad reality is that it will never be far enough away from the gossip and cyberbullying that can happen over the Internet.

Before her death, Amanda was planning on getting a tattoo with the words “Stay Strong” on her arm. Instead, her father went alone to get this tattoo; one last thing he could do for her daughter. Now, after everything Amanda and countless others have had to go through, there are still teens who are being bullied, and committing suicide because of it. So now the question is... what do we do about it?