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

by Kate Fagan

The relatively early age—sometimes as early as elementary school—at which parents define children as athletes makes it more difficult to cultivate other parts of their identity. 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?

According to pretty much every study conducted over the past five years, levels of empathy among college-age students is plummeting. 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.”

Talking openly about debilitating thoughts and emotions might seem like a logical and necessary step for an athlete, until you consider that sports are built on the pillars of toughness and perseverance. Picture every Hollywood sports movie, ever. One thing they all have in common: a montage of the lead character pushing through the pain, training to become the best. Our culture celebrates harder, faster, stronger. Vulnerability, it would seem, undermines that pursuit. And within sports culture, continuing to practice or play, no matter what your mind or body says, is romanticized: T-shirts are emblazoned with quotes, inspirational sayings are stenciled on the locker room wall, epic speeches are given.

Many coaches believe these moments are forks in the road, and that choosing to push through pain—in whatever form that pain comes—is what creates champions. Athletes often believe this, too. And it’s not entirely wrong. Pushing through pain, clearing hurdles others have crashed into, is how an athlete improves. Knowing the difference between a hurdle and a brick wall is also crucial—yet recognizing that difference is almost impossible when you’re eighteen years old. That’s the coach’s job. And if a coach isn’t sensitive to brick walls, athletes are often left to engage in debilitating mental warfare: one part of the mind says no more; the other part tells them they’re weak for saying no more.

According to the NCAA, suicide ranks as the third most frequent cause of death among student-athletes—behind accidents and cardiac failure. Colleges and universities do have policies and procedures in place to respond to a student-athlete’s mental health issues. The concern is that the quality of the response, and the intrinsic understanding of the issues, is often subpar, especially when compared to everything we know and study, and discuss at length, about an athlete’s body.

According to a 2014 article on ESPN, fewer than twenty-five Division I athletic departments employed a psychologist on staff. The importance of a psychologist is this: she may be the only staff member whose job is not related to winning. Even the most compassionate coaches and trainers are dependent on the physical performance of their athletes. It’s a nice bonus if they graduate healthy human beings, but that’s not specifically why they’re drawing a paycheck.

Rates of depression and anxiety among college students are higher than ever. The specific numbers vary, depending on the study, but all show a disturbing trend. According to the American College Health Association, the suicide rate among fifteen-to twenty-four-year-olds has tripled since the 1950s. An annual survey of college freshmen found that 30 percent reported feeling overwhelmed, with that number rising to 40.5 percent among women. This is the highest percentage registered since the survey started in 1985, at which point the numbers were approximately half what they are now. One study found that an average high school student today likely deals with as much anxiety as did a psychiatric patient in the 1950s.

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.

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.

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.

It’s easier to feel connected online than to truly connect in real life. So plugging in becomes addicting. We’d rather sign on and feel some superficial sense of connection than work and possibly fail at true connection offline. Being in the real world can be uncomfortable, especially after you spend so much time online.

Before social media, we mostly interacted with one another in the bright light of day, where we all have so much less control over how we might look or seem. Now we spend hours a day consuming one another online. Moreover, digital natives have known only this reality. They have grown up on Instagram and Snapchat, absorbing hundreds of images a day. And most of these perfect pictures, loaded into boxes, reflect little of each person’s reality. We’re consuming an increasingly filtered world yet walking through our own realities unfiltered.

Consider this passage from Mind Change: “Teenagers who spoke with their parents over the phone or in person released similar amounts of oxytocin [an indication of bonding and well-being] and showed similar low levels of cortisol [a marker of stress], indicative of a reduction in stress. In comparison, those who instant-messaged their parents released no oxytocin and had salivary cortisol levels as high as those who did not interact with their parents at all. Thus while the younger generation may favor non-oral modes of communication, when it comes to providing emotional support, messaging appears comparable to not speaking with anyone at all.”

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.

A searching energy permeates almost every young person’s social media. After all, what is a social feed if not a journal, but in digital, visual form? Perhaps the most important distinguishing feature of a social account is its public nature, the understanding each user has, from the moment of launch, that everything is for public consumption. But perhaps we are overstating the effect of this distinction: If in private, most of us allow ourselves to say or write certain truths we otherwise wouldn’t, then perhaps the reverse holds true. Perhaps we share things in public that we couldn’t offer in private. 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 are so credulous when we assume that everyone else must be the version of themselves they portray in public, even if we are hardly the people we present ourselves as. 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. Would you put more time, or less, into a post if you knew it was your last? Would you want the image and words to be perfect, an ideal lasting representation of you, or would you quickly recognize the futility of the pursuit, that the whole thing was a mirage merely reflecting distorted images of the real world? And would you instead spend your time absorbing the world itself?

We have translated expressions and emotions into emojis, and simply using an emoji seems to tell the recipient that all is okay. The inclusion of even one of those animated faces signals ease and lightness, regardless of what emotion the emoji represents, even if it represents crying.

Very true

Anticipation allows us to be in two different moments at once. But it is often a zero-sum game: we steal from one to fuel the other.

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. Social media reflects our actual existence, but feels freer: not mired in tangible weight and sweat and fear and sadness. Social media is a picture of the Colosseum in glorious lighting, with an upbeat hashtag; it’s not the friend standing in front of you, dismayed at her inexplicable disappointment.

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.