Well, I guess you could say Jo wasn't your average kid growing up. With singing and performing being a favourite hobby in her life, Jo was also tormented throughout school because of her talents. "They would say, 'you think you're so pretty, you think you're so popular, you think you have a good voice'. They would make me stand on tables and sing. It was just general bitchiness and being nasty," she commented on the subject. She also tried to kill herself when she was a mere 14 by taking an overdose of painkillers. "It was awful, really bad. It was mental and physical abuse every day. The bullying was all the time - I never got a break from it. They hit me, they threw me down the stairs, they called me names. I always thought they were waiting for me. I dreaded going to the next class because I knew that walking from one class to another I would get something along the way," Jo continued. So, the only way out, or so she thought, was suicide. However, she regrets it: "I got really depressed and I thought there was no way out. I was really down and I knew I had to do something about it. 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. In a way it was my cry for help because I couldn't see any way out." Now, looking back, she advises kids today that suicide is certainly not the answer, "I am not proud of what I did but sometimes things get so bad you don't know what to do," she said. "At that age you don't realise that you have a whole life ahead of you, you just live for that moment. And if things aren't going right for you at that moment you think there is no way out. Committing suicide may seem the easiest way out. But now when I look back I think I was stupid. If the pills had worked I wouldn't be here now."
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