What Made Maddy Run: The Secret Struggles and Tragic Death of an All-American Teen

by Kate Fagan

One study found that an average high school student today likely deals with as much anxiety as did a psychiatric patient in the 1950s.

Introspection means talking to yourself, and one of the best ways of talking to yourself is by talking to another person. One other person you can trust, one other person to whom you can unfold your soul. One other person you feel safe enough with to allow you to acknowledge things—to acknowledge things to yourself—that you otherwise can’t. Doubts you aren’t supposed to have, questions you aren’t supposed to ask. Feelings or opinions that would get you laughed at by the group or reprimanded by the authorities. This is what we call thinking out loud, discovering what you believe in the course of articulating it. But it takes just as much time and just as much patience as solitude in the strict sense. And our new electronic world has disrupted it just as violently. Instead of having one or two true friends that we can sit and talk to for three hours at a time, we have 968 “friends” that we never actually talk to; instead we just bounce one-line messages off them a hundred times a day. This is not friendship, this is distraction.

Comparing your everyday existence to someone else’s highlight reel is dangerous for both of you.

Those lucky enough to grow up envisioning college start hearing about the building blocks of a college résumé (the boxes that need checking; the optics that need preserving) from the moment they enter high school, and sometimes even sooner. Too often, kids are herded into commitments and activities that are born not of passion but of obligation. These obligations can continue for years because stopping is not seen as a possibility. Those who do stop risk being perceived as lacking the intestinal fortitude to push through when the going gets tough.

Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite, William Deresiewicz

observes that our education system seems to be producing kids who have trouble thinking critically and finding their purpose.

But we have to look at what we’re doing to our kids. We have to have the strength to raise them to care about something other than ‘success’ in the very narrow terms in which it’s come to be defined. I’m not saying you can have it all: In fact, that’s one of my biggest messages in the book. You have to choose. Parents already tell their kids to ‘do what you love’ and ‘follow your dreams.’ But kids know that they don’t really mean it, that what they really want is status and success. Well, we have to really mean it.”

suicide prevention center in 1958. That’s not that long ago. So we’re