S CLUB 7 star JO O’MEARA has revealed that she tried to kill herself after persistent bullying.
“It was awful, really bad. It was mental and physical abuse every day,” Jo recalls. “I never got a break from it. They hit me, they threw me down the stairs, they called me names. They would say, ‘You think you’re so pretty, you think you’re so popular, you think you have a good voice’. The fear was constant from the moment I woke up to the moment I went to bed.”
UK tabloid The Sun reports today (November 9) that a 14-year-old O’Meara downed twelve headache pills in front of school bullies as a cry for help. Says Jo: “I took the pills at school in front of the bullies. I wanted to show them what they were making me do to myself – to let them see how wrong they were. But they just tried to put the pills down my throat themselves – they tried to help me. I had to go to hospital and get my stomach pumped.”
Jo, whose band are releasing this year’s BBC Children In Need charity single, has broken her silence because “I just want to let kids know that suicide is not the way out. That just makes you look weak and it makes the bullies look strong.”
Her advice to victims of bullying is to “ask for help now. The sooner you get support from adults who care, the sooner it will stop. If you fight the bullies, it makes you a stronger person”.