Madison Holleran, a beautiful, smart, athletically gifted nineteen year old U Penn freshman, killed herself last Friday. She jumped from the top of a parking garage in downtown Philadelphia.
Already the story has appeared in Time magazine, and lots of other media outlets.
Holleran’s is the sort of suicide that gets attention.
It gets singled out because it’s a big shock. Unless there was a suicide note (right now it looks as if there wasn’t), this one was a real stunner. An extremely young woman with absolutely everything going for her (that’s how it looked, anyway) and with nothing we know of signalling depression does this thing.
In almost every case like Holleran’s I’ve covered on this blog, there was prior evidence (sometimes a little; sometimes a lot) of mental unbalance. Sometimes there was a note; sometimes a recent cryptic note on a Facebook page now made sense.
Frequently these deaths were – like Holleran’s – first-year students, which suggests that something in the transition to a new school, a new life, triggered the trouble.
In any case, the particular peril you’re in when you’re young and depressed is impulsivity – the pull toward the sudden jump. Go here for an extract from a New York Times article about youth, depression, impulsivity, and suicide. And here for a more lengthy discussion of the subject.
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UPDATE: As her father tells it, it does indeed seem to have been stress over a new school, new pressures. She had been seriously depressed. And she did leave a note.
January 20th, 2014 at 9:00PM
This has been a bad couple of weeks on campus. Two students died over winter break in as-yet-unspecified circumstances (one in China, one in West Philly) and now this tragedy. As an instructor, an adviser, and as a parent, I find this very distressing.
January 20th, 2014 at 11:14PM
Tough times at Penn. One of my Wharton Graduate classmates was killed on the street in West Philadelphia in 1980.