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

An account of mental illness among college athletes in the Internet age, told through the tragic life of former U Penn runner Madison Holleran

If you scrolled through 19-year-old Madison Holleran’s Instagram, you would see a picture perfect life: a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania, recruited for the track team, beautiful, popular, fit, and fiercely intelligent. This was a girl who succeeded at everything she tried, and who was only getting started. But when Madison started her long-awaited college career, something changed. Her parents noticed she had withdrawn. She complained of being unhappy, and considered transferring schools. When Madison’s dad, Jim, dropped her off for spring semester, she held him a split second longer than usual. She took her own life roughly a week later.

FILTERED is grown out of the piece Kate Fagan wrote about Madison’s life for ESPN. What started as a profile of a successful young athlete and her tragic ending became so much larger when Fagan started to hear from other college athletes also struggling with mental illness. This is the story of Madison Holleran’s life, and her struggle with depression, but it is also the bigger picture of the many mounting pressures young people, and college athletes in particular, face to be perfect, especially in the Internet age of relentless connectivity and social media saturation.