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

by Kate Fagan

Jim and Stacy, Susie and Kobus, and millions of other parents hadn’t yet considered how the Internet might be affecting their kids, how it was fostering an increased dependence on outside validation, and consequently a decreased ability to soothe themselves. In 2013, these were just beginning to register as increasing concerns.

When Jim was growing up, good colleges were challenging to get into, but it wasn’t like it is today, when being a solid, diligent student is no longer enough. Students today must display excellence—not just competence—in numerous areas. The pressure to be great, not just good, is unrelenting. Believing that this pressure will simply disappear once kids arrive on campus seems like wishful thinking.

Very little else in our society is rewarded as athletics are. And when you’re young, the distinction between an activity that truly satisfies your soul and one that merely brings accolades is difficult to parse. For many, those two things aren’t mutually exclusive. For others, sports are actually not their passion, a realization that doesn’t come until they’re put into the fire of college sports. But admitting ambivalence of this kind can feel like considering filing for divorce the day after a wedding: everyone involved has already invested so much time and money. And hadn’t you convinced yourself you were truly in love?

One evening, I spoke about mental health with the Student Athlete Advisory Committee, and the first question directed at me was, “How can we think differently as athletes, because from the first day we step on campus, we’re taught that champions never quit and perseverance is what makes greatness? I’m worried a teammate might be really hurting and all I see is weakness.” No good answer exists for this question, which was the response I gave.

The University of Michigan conducted a study in 2014 that found that college kids are 40 percent less empathetic than they were just twenty years before. Researchers at Michigan’s Institute for Social Research shared their thoughts on why: “The ease of having ‘friends’ online might make people more likely to just tune out when they don’t feel like responding to others’ problems, a behavior that could carry over offline. Add in the hypercompetitive atmosphere and inflated expectations of success, born of celebrity ‘reality shows,’ and you have a social environment that works against slowing down and listening to someone who needs a bit of sympathy.”

In 2014, the American College Health Association surveyed nearly twenty thousand student-athletes. Some 28 percent of female student-athletes and 21 percent of males reported feeling depressed, while 48 percent of female student-athletes and 31 percent of males reported feeling anxious. Approximately 14 percent said they had seriously considered suicide, with 6 percent saying they had attempted it.

According to the NCAA, suicide ranks as the third most frequent cause of death among student-athletes—behind accidents and cardiac failure.

According to a 2014 article on ESPN, fewer than twenty-five Division I athletic departments employed a psychologist on staff.

“How do you survive those less-than-perfect situations when discipline isn’t enough? When grittiness gets you through the workouts but can’t seem to get you through the rest of the day? As a runner, you’re highly in tune with your body, and you know its highs and lows; you know your normal aches and pains, and you know when you should probably see the athletic trainer. Learning the highs and lows of your mind is much harder.”

What I learned about myself and about my peers was that our main source of stress was that we were simply not allowed to be human… My generation is not suffering because we didn’t learn how to lose a game of flag football. We’re suffering because everything we do is filtered through a lens of consumerism. We see ourselves as “products” to be “branded” and “marketed” in all venues of our lives: social, romantic, and professional. This has been a mindset inculcated into us from an early age.

EVERYTHING we do is seen as instrumental towards marketing ourselves for the college admission boards, or for the job market, or to help us rush a fraternity or sorority, or to help us win friends, or to help us be a more attractive potential partner. You see the capitalist worldview has infiltrated our psychology, and our sense of self-worth. And it is toxic. It results in fear of being ourselves and following what we really want to do. It results in micro-managing every aspect of our lives to best effect so that it looks good for Facebook or LinkedIn or Tinder.

It results in constant comparisons with our peers (which causes depression) and catastrophizing of any potential dent to our marketability (which results in anxiety). Essentially, it results in a dehumanized mindset. Of course depression and anxiety are rampant.

Developing competence at an activity that one enjoys, making friends, finding meaning in life, and pursuing a heartfelt religious path are examples of intrinsic goals. Getting high grades in school, making lots of money, achieving high status, and looking good to others are examples of extrinsic goals. Twenge argues convincingly that there has been a continual shift away from intrinsic toward extrinsic values in the culture at large and among young people in particular, promoted in part by the mass marketing of consumer goods through television and other media.

Now add in social media. Is there anything you have less control over than how many likes you receive on a photo? As scholar William Deresiewicz has written, we have created a generation of world-class hoop jumpers, of “excellent sheep,” of young people who know what they’re supposed to say, but not necessarily why they’re saying it. We’re teaching young people what to think, but not how to think.

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.

I had been doing this for a long time, of my own volition. In the past few years, I’ve spent almost as much time constructing and maintaining my online self as I have my real, human self. I’ve certainly spent more time on Instagram exercising my image than I have in the gym exercising my body.

This is an amazing. I am stunned people are doing this performing for an audience so hardcore. However, not surprised. Online social media comments have ALWAYS seemed like either a parroting of the latest popular thought or groupthink outrage to me.

Social media doesn’t represent the first chance we’ve had to “distort” our identity, but it is the first that allows us to do so in such volume, and with such accessibility. Many celebrities have long felt the extreme disconnect between the public and private versions of themselves. Now the lived experience of a fractured persona, and the emotional impact of it, is being felt to varying degrees by millions of us.

How much of our happiness is fueled by society’s validation of our choices? It seems that the younger we are, the more dependent we are on making choices others will value and praise—perhaps because we haven’t developed, or don’t yet fully trust, our ability to name or even know what makes us happy.

If one only wished to be happy, this could be easily accomplished; but we wish to be happier than other people, and this is always difficult, for we believe others to be happier than they are. —Montesquieu

If we’ve accepted that we are different in private, is this not also true for how we reveal ourselves in public? And which version of ourselves is more real?

As young people, we are trying to find our voice: trying out who we are, again and again, until something feels more accurate than the previous thing. Yet we rarely admit—or even recognize—that this is what we’re doing. On social media, few people confess that they’ve poured immense time and energy into what they post. We don’t confess this because we assume we’re the only ones who fret over such trivial things. Because nobody could possibly be as self-conscious as we are. We believe what we see. And we can’t be what we can’t see.

We put time into our social media because we believe that it affords us the unique opportunity to fashion our own identity. We care about the images we post and the lines we write underneath those images, because it’s all part of reflecting who we are and constructing who we want to become.

This generation, everybody is supposed to be good at everything. But God forbid if you’re not. I tell my kids: I went to college. Nobody took us on college tours. They were just like, ‘You want to go to college?’ And they would drop you off and that was it.

Anticipation fuels optimism, at least temporarily. We tell ourselves that the current moment will not last forever, that the next moment will deliver us somewhere better. Of course, if that promise is repeatedly broken, if those next moments are never better, a kind of melancholy can set in: both our present and future seem tarnished.

Isn’t social media fueled by anticipation? A world exists in our phone, which we can retreat to—an escape that might offer us something more pleasant, or at least a distraction from our momentary boredom at being a human who is alive in the world, and therefore dealing with all the things that come with that.

In deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects. Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are.

So many of these college freshmen felt a moral obligation to project a certain kind of happiness. They could not, as one student put it, “in good conscience” disseminate sadness and unhappiness into the world. Because they chose to remain conscious, they participated in a performance meant to make the collective comfortable, but which came at personal cost—a cost often small, but occasionally great. The layers of ethical issues are numerous. Some of us could be sharing “just to do it,” but the fact of our sharing will evoke in others feelings and ideas about the way the world works.

Our posts are part of an ecosystem: we are all engaged in creating a story that reacts to the stories around us. Then if you dig one layer deeper, we are dealing with another variable. Before we share, we engage in a conversation with ourselves about what kind of image of ourselves we are placing in the world and what the image must mean to us as it relates to the world. Social media is a form of offense and defense: we consume, we absorb, and we decide what to consume and absorb based on what we’ve consumed and absorbed.

In other words, when you walk through Central Park, you are partially absorbing the sights and sounds of being alive, and you are also pasting items, in your mind’s eye, into a potential social post. Perhaps we are now all like walking versions of those collages we used to make—the ones that incorporated real photographs as well as idealized magazine cutouts and headlines.

I don’t think enough people realize that suicide is something that is cumulative, and there are certain catalysts.