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

by Kate Fagan

hashtag; it’s not the friend standing in front of you, dismayed at her inexp...

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.

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 wha...

you are not concerned with sharing every moment with hundreds (or thousands, or millions) of others, does the moment belong to you in a more profound way?

Sometimes when we talk of Hollywood stars, we hypothesize that all of the pictures they’ve had taken of themselves, those posed for and those stolen, have somehow zapped them of an unquantifiable

essence, like a distant cousin of what happens to the photographs themselves, which fade over time. If you share a picture of yourself eating pie, instead of simply enjoying the pie in real...

Depression does not have a one-size-fits-all prognosis. Bill Schmitz Jr., the former president of the American Association of Suicidology, points out that the course varies. “In a way, it’s the same as cancer,” he says. “For some, we might prolong life for months, for years. For others, it can be very

sudden.”

As a suicide survivor, she possesses insight I do not. She is a photographer, occasional writer, and suicide awareness activist. Stage’s main project is called Live Through This, a portrait and oral history series on survivors of suicide attempts. The goal of the series is to humanize survivors, to shatter the stereotype about who lives with suicidal thoughts, and to change the conversation around suicide.

Maybe “why” is not the question to ask about Madison’s death. Or whether she deliberately chose this at all; that is, other than in the very moment she started climbing the stairs. A definitive story is needed for those of us left behind, so we can feel better. Amid chaos, order and understanding feel paramount. We feel we must find a reason for why she jumped—a reason that makes sense to a healthy mind. But there is no one thing. There are rivers that merge and create a powerful current. And we can’t fully know why they all merged, right then, right there, around Maddy. Still, we can try to analyze each one, the way it bends and curves, what it turns into when it blends with another. We can do this, learn everything we can, how

to talk to others about their pain or our own, in the hope that fewer people get caught in this same, fierce swirl.