opinions influenced by the media?

[russotto]

Jag: Social services are a bandaid. At best, they can help someone tolerate the intolerable for a few more years. Second best, they can detect the ones who break before they suicide or get homicidal -- but by that time they ARE broken.

Xugumad: True, not everyone who goes through hell at school turns homicidal. But to pass it off on mental illness is to avoid the issue. Suicide and self-mutilation are supposed to be the result of mental illness as well. But what caused the mental illness? Again, my answer is "torture". Some of the tortured are better able to withstand it than others. Most who break are predisposed to break in a self-destructive way rather than a homicidal way. But it's a big country, and there's a lot of torture going on, so now and then you get one who breaks the wrong way. And even if it is a specific mental illness (unrelated to the toture), that hardly implicates the media.

As for the wrapper analogy: some people only GET the empty wrappers. Then we call 'em crazy for complaining.