Breaking up with your first love is hard to do, but at the age of 18, it was a particularly traumatic experience for Nikki Mattocks. Rather than the clean break she had hoped for, she found herself being bombarded with hateful messages on social media from her ex-boyfriend’s friends. One even urged her to kill herself.

“I withdrew a lot. The messages made me so depressed and led to me taking an overdose,” says Mattocks. She is just one of millions of people around the world who have found themselves the victim of bullying. Even in our modern, progressive society, it is too often overlooked and commonly dismissed as a rite of passage, but bullying affects between a fifth and a third of children at school. Adults suffer similar rates of harassment at work.

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Yet research has shown that bullying can leave a lasting scar on people’s lives, causing long-term damage to their future health, wealth and relationships. And the increasing amount of time we spend online exposes us to forms of bullying that, while faceless, can be just as devastating. Young people subjected to cyberbullying suffer more from depression than non-victims and are at least twice as likely to self-harm and to attempt suicide.

Luckily for Mattocks, her break up and the subsequent cyberbullying occurred just as she was about to start university. In this new environment she was able to make new friends who helped her.

“It [cyber bullying] changed my outlook,” she says. “It made me a kinder, stronger person.” Mattocks now works as a mental health campaigner, helping others who face bullying. She believes more needs to be done to curb bullying online.