MADISON HOLLERAN’S FIRST SEMESTER at Penn was tough, despite her 3.5 GPA.
She had a big, close social circle in high school, a support system built
from childhood. That chapter of Holleran’s life can still be seen online —
playing sports, singing with friends, dancing with her old teammates on a
hotel bed.
Those bonds aren’t forged overnight at a new school. But Holleran was
probably a lot more popular in college than she believed. The new friends
she made remember her stopping, repeatedly, anywhere she walked, to say
hello to people she knew. Later, media coverage would fixate on her looks —
her thin frame, delicate features and joy-bomb smile. Her track teammates
simply thought she was relaxed and confident.
“She was just one of those people who had an effortless glow about her,”
says Lauren Murphy, a fellow runner. “She did everything with elegance and
grace.”
Holleran did confide in a couple of new friends. She told Ashley Montgomery,
another freshman on the track team, that Penn wasn’t what she’d hoped.
Running track wore on her. She missed her pals back home. She talked, a lot,
about what she wanted from life — a home in California, maybe, and plenty
of outdoor time. “It sounds funny to say, but she was very serious about
being happy,” says Montgomery. “She’d try to figure out what happiness is
, like a formula, and she’d get really analytical.”
Holleran and Montgomery ran together, frequently, through the city. Holleran
often paused to take pictures of pretty views. On a fall evening, after
track, Holleran hauled Montgomery to the top of Franklin Field. The sunset
cascaded before them, swirls of orange and pink decorating the sky. At the
time, Montgomery considered the constant picture-taking an eccentricity.
Later, Montgomery came to believe that for Holleran, happiness was “more a
thought than a feeling” — something she caught sight of, outside herself,
and tried to capture before it disappeared.
LIZZY HATCHER REGISTERED the sound, buzzing through her sleep.
The phone.
She could feel her husband, Kevin, rouse beside her. And as the world around
her came into focus — still dark, phone ringing — she could feel fear,
like a flatworm, twitch and curl in her stomach.
She remembers only the key words the doctor told her husband: “Son. Elvis.
Attempted suicide. Critical.” From there, her every act — sitting up in
bed, putting her feet to the floor, standing — felt unreal. The university
arranged travel from Florida, but snow in Philadelphia forced an agonizing
series of delays at the airport. “It was just an awful, awful day,” she
says. “Such a helpless feeling.”
By the time the Hatchers landed, it was after 9 p.m. Someone from Penn —
Hatcher doesn’t remember who — picked them up and drove them straight to
the hospital. Elvis was already on life support. “The next morning,” says
Hatcher, “he passed away.”
Hatcher posts on Facebook regularly, intermixing fond remembrances of Elvis
with exhortations on treating depression. She speaks proudly of her son — a
multi- instrumentalist and dancer with a furious wave of curly hair who
loved wearing bow ties. He’d made friends at Penn and joined a fraternity.
But over the course of multiple phone conversations, her voice weakens. “
Life is just … so different now,” she says. “We just try to get through
the day.”
Two days after Hatcher’s death, Penn acted swiftly, announcing the hiring
of three new mental health counselors at Counseling and Psychological
Services, or CAPS, and, weeks later, the formation of a Task Force on
Student Psychological Health and Welfare. Penn president Amy Gutmann wrote
about the changes in a university-wide email, simultaneously touting the
expansion of services and denying any connection between the counseling
center and the suicides.
“While all evidence indicates that the recent student deaths are unrelated
to each other,” she wrote, “and certainly unrelated to the work done at
CAPS, we know that the needs of the community are placing greater than ever
demand on our valuable student support teams.”
In the same memo, Gutmann noted that in the past eight years, CAPS had grown
its senior staff by 10. The message struck some as cold politicking when a
tender hand was needed; in one line, Gutmann used the acronym “FTE” to
denote the hiring of “Full Time Employees.”
“I think the whole response just reflected a kind of corporate mind-set,”
says Toorjo Ghose, a member of Penn’s faculty senate and an assistant
professor in the School of Social Policy & Practice. “She wrote as if she
was responding to shareholders — not to young people who might be grieving
and in pain.”
In terms of mental health, Penn students face a unique challenge. The school
culture is notoriously competitive, a battle among valedictorian-level
intellects where a Work harder, play harder mentality runs from the Wharton
Business School to the humanities and sciences. Last year, 34th Street
Magazine published a survey that found 71 percent of Penn students got
blackout drunk at least once in college. For close to 25 percent, blacking
out was the goal. Some kids also talk about a phenomenon called “Penn Face,
” in which students express how stressful their lives are without ever
showing any strain.
This culture may not be responsible for Hatcher’s death, or Holleran’s.
But should it change in some way so that the next Hatcher or Holleran might
be helped?
University spokesman Ron Ozio didn’t make any Penn administrators or
professors available for interviews. Late in February, however, Penn’s
silence was broken: The dean of the School of Social Policy & Practice,
Richard Gelles, told me one of his students — later identified as Alice
Wiley — had died by suicide over break, prior to Holleran and Hatcher.
Penn can’t exactly be accused of hiding Wiley’s death; the school says it
wasn’t aware of it until January. No law requires universities to track or
disclose suicides among their student bodies. Experts also present strong
data demonstrating that publicizing a suicide can encourage further suicides
— a phenomenon known as the “contagion” effect. And out of respect for
privacy or liability concerns, universities usually defer to the deceased
student’s parents, rendering a campus suicide a secret.
History suggests, however, that a cluster of suicides brings change. Drexel
University responded to a pair of suicides last year by forming a task force
, which is still making recommendations. Penn’s fellow Ivy League school
Cornell suffered a cluster of suicides from 2009 to 2011 and moved swiftly
to upgrade its mental health services. And momentum is developing for
changes at Penn and beyond.
