Locked Out & Locked In: Madison Holleran’s Mask of Perfection and Inner Pain

In this episode of The Secret Passage Podcast we discuss Madison Holleran, a 19-year-old University of Pennsylvania student and elite athlete who died by suicide in 2014. Despite her outward success and curated social media presence, Madison struggled with the transition to college life and became depressed. We discuss how societal expectations, social media, and unrecognized mental health struggles can create a silent crisis, even in those who seem to "have it all." 

 

Links:

 

What Made Maddy Run by Kate Fagan:

 

https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/kate-fagan/what-made-maddy-run/9780316356534/?lens=little-brown

 

Madison Holleran Foundation:

 

https://www.madisonholleranfoundation.org/

 

Suicide Prevention Resource Center:

 

https://sprc.org/about-sprc/

 

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Secret Passage Podcast is hosted by Dana Vespoli and Shannon Rogers

Producer: Tim Rogers

Editor: Mitch Silver

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
This podcast may contain discussions of graphic violence, unsettling themes, supernaturalphenomena, and other topics that some listeners may find disturbing or triggering.
Listener discretion is advised.
This podcast is intended for entertainment purposes only.
The opinions expressed are simply those of the individual hosts and do not represent theprofession of psychology or constitute professional advice.

(00:37):
Welcome back guys to the secret passage podcast.
Sorry, I was distracted by my cat.
I'm Dana Vespoly.
Here's my cohost Shannon Rogers.
I just, I'm sorry.
I just said your name.
You could have done it and I did it instead.
That's OK.
I love being introduced.
my goodness, we're back.
Another video episode.

(01:00):
Hope you guys liked the last one.
Well, Shannon, any interesting secret passages you traveled down this past week?
Well, I had a memory, because we're talking about college this week.
And I had this memory of when I first started JFK that I really wanted to share.

(01:23):
OK.
So JFKU is a kind of a hippie university.
They used to have like a parapsychology program back in the day.
Oh, shit.
Yeah.
So it's kind of like on par with CIIS, which everybody knows about, California Instituteof Integral Studies.
And that's the San Francisco version of JFK.
But JFK is like dead now.
It went out of business.

(01:45):
It sold itself to National University.
And then it got corporatized.
then I think it still exists, but it's only online for National University.
Anyway, when I first started there, I had my first class.
And it was called Paradigms of Consciousness, because I got my degree in transpersonalpsychology, which is like spiritual psychology.
And that's where I learned about PemaChildren and like

(02:07):
did diamond approach work.
And in my first class, I sat down and the teacher was calling roll and he called outsomeone's name.
And I hear this little voice in the background.
It's all, the name I nurture is Gaia.
I was like, the name I nurture is Gaia.
Wow.
Okay.
And so that was my first experience in my first class.

(02:28):
And then by the time I got to the end of my program in like 2003,
We go to become a therapist.
have to do like a year of field placement before you do your internship.
So we all went to, most of us went to the John F Kennedy University center for holisticcounseling in Oakland.
And it's in this, was in this old church and right at the end of Harrison, rememberHarrison street, where in Oakland Avenue, like when Peter and I lived in that, that, did

(02:56):
you ever know us when we lived in that warehouse space between Harrison street and OaklandAvenue?
That's why I first met you.
okay.
So we, the counseling center was down at the end of Harrison street.
And so anyway, we had this ceremony.
So the cohorts would move through the counseling center and, uh, you know, one cohortwould start and then they would be halfway through and then another cohort would start.

(03:19):
so every time we had a new cohort coming in, they would plant the, the group ahead wouldplan this ritual for the people who came in afterwards.
So.
So we show up and we're all nervous, right?
And we're this small cohort because it was like the spring cohort.
And they blindfold us.
I know they thought this was like so cool.

(03:41):
They probably spent so much time doing this.
I remember, I think they blindfolded us or they said, you have to close your eyes.
And we're in this group and we close our eyes and they lead us down these stairway intothis cold.
You can just feel it colder and colder and colder and someone is playing the didgeridoo inthe background and I'm like

(04:03):
sounds like a horror movie.
Yeah.
So I'm like, there's a didgeridoo in the background, which I find is a terrifyinginstrument.
It's a spooky sound.
Didgeridoo not.
Didgeridoo don't do that.
Didgeri stop.
Didgeri knock it off.

(04:25):
So I'm like already, like what the?
And then all of sudden we get led to these chairs and we sit in a circle.
And then I can hear people shuffling around us, forming a circle around us.
And then they go through everybody's name.
And I was a Lister back then.
So they're like Shannon Lister.
And then all of a sudden everybody in the room would chant, we welcome your light.

(04:49):
We went through the whole thing.
Sylvia Costales, we welcome your light.
And that sure is Kaya.
light nurtured?
No, Gaia was a man, and he lost his voice during a retreat.
And he thought it was like a spiritual thing.

(05:09):
And he's adorable, though.
He was a very sweet person.
But anyway, so he didn't end up going through the whole program.
So we're standing there.
And then they make us turn around, open our eyes, and face everyone, the teachers, thetherapists.
And they move around the circle painfully slowly, staring you in the eyes as like it waslike a

(05:31):
hazing and I look over at my friend Sylvia and she's just bawling and I'm like I know andwe left and she was like that was like spiritual rape and I was like kind of so anyway
that was my secret passage that I wanted to share with the world.
Spiritual rape is a new expression I'm going to adopt.

(05:51):
oh
Hahaha.
That's wild.
It was so insane.
Yeah.
That is so interesting.
I had no idea.
This whole time I thought that you went through like kind of a standard program where yougo to classes and you do this, you do that, you but that is, that's something else.

(06:13):
Yeah, so, but I was old enough, you know, that it, mean, I was, yeah, I was like 29 orsomething, but I can imagine if I was like 19.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Wow.
Oh, wow.
I'm trying to think of something.
also, you know, researching this episode got me thinking also about my college years andmy time rowing crew, which I did in college.

(06:49):
You know, I went to a division three school.
was nowhere near.
the level of the two people we're talking about this episode, Madison Holleran and KatieMeyer.
They're both elite level athletes.
But even just within my little team and all of that, I just, remember really beingabsorbed.

(07:12):
Like it was my world, it was my life.
ah And so just I think about that, like on that level, even for me, just how-
much my identity was wrapped in the team, in my coach, just every, it was the focal pointof my life for that, you know, for those years.

(07:40):
So I was just thinking about that.
was thinking about kind of all the different, sorry, guys, if you see me looking aroundlike this, I'm not,
I'm just checking where all my individual animals are at any given time in the room.
But yeah, just how our identities are shaped and how vulnerable we are when we're teensand our sense of self and just how our world narrows into just whatever it is that our

(08:18):
focus is on.
You know, you see that in kids trying on these different things, you know, like my gothphase, my this phase, that phase.
And, and you see yourself just in that's your whole identity.
So I was just thinking about that.
was thinking about my, my identity at the age of 1920 versus like kind of where I am nowin the weird, weird, absolutely bizarre, wild, crazy, but

(08:48):
fantastic nonetheless, my journey to where I am now and ah all the times that I havesucceeded, all the times that I have fucked up really badly, all the times that I have
managed to redeem myself, all the times that I still up to now have a lot to sort ofreconcile.

(09:10):
And so I think about, I know that's a very odd kind of twisty tourney.
secret passage, but that's what I love about doing these shows is the reflection that weget to have on the ways in which these stories, these people's you know, we're all
connected in a way, but the ways in which we're connected and the ways in which theirstories resonate for us and hopefully for you guys listening.

(09:34):
So very heavy, very heavy week doing the research.
But with that said, guess let's get into it.
Today we're talking about two really extraordinary young women who are no longer with us,Madison Holleran, who was a 19 year old, incredibly gifted student and athlete at

(09:57):
University of Pennsylvania.
Major trigger warning, we are talking about suicide.
So just, you know, it's uh just letting everyone know in case they need to like clickpast.
you know, totally get it.
It's a tough subject, but it's an important one, especially just because there's Madison'sstory, which, you know, she died in 2014, January of 2014.

(10:25):
But more recently, Katie Meyer, who's also incredibly gifted soccer star at Stanford, goodstudent, also died by suicide in 2022.
So.
more recently and her family is uh suing Stanford University for wrongful death.

(10:47):
ah And they go to trial in 2026, so next year.
And so we're talking about them because ah this is a situation which we see time and timeagain, which is really incredibly, the people we think that have everything, Madison was

(11:08):
gorgeous girl, seemed to have it all.
had a social media presence that was really, she presented as perfect, really.
If you looked at her Instagram, you would think this girl is happy, this girl is goingplaces, look at her, she's got so many friends, look at all of these, what's that?

(11:29):
uh Not just a soccer star, but a track star.
Like she wasn't, it was like she was being recruited for soccer and then was doing,
track as a way to stay in shape just so happened to be breaking records for track, likewithout even trying.
And then ended up being recruited by University of Pennsylvania for track.

(11:53):
So you see that loving family, big family, financially secure.
They were doing fine.
And then after her first semester at University of Pennsylvania, she took her life.
She felt like a failure.
And so there's,
you know, there's the way we present to the world and this need, this need, this pressurewe feel to curate our lives, to present a reality that is heavily filtered, that isn't

(12:23):
real.
And then at the same time, believing what we see in other people's profiles, even thoughlike cognitively we know better, right?
Intellectually we know better.
I feel like if you had said, hey, Madison, you know that not everything that you see onInstagram is real, she'd probably say, well, yeah, I know.
And I think she even said to her mother, her mom's like, you look so happy in thesepictures you posted.

(12:44):
And she goes, mom, those are just pictures.
She even knows, she even knew.
But we believe what we see.
We tend to, even though intellectually we know better, we tend to believe, we tend tocovet these things that we know are impossible, but we want them to be real.
that part of what, like in terms of what led her to do it, was that considered a bigfactor?

(13:11):
You know, that she was sort of looking online and comparing herself to other people andthat kind thing?
I think that may have been a small part of it.
oh
I mean, I know it's absolute hell.
I know we all do it.
You know, we just, compare our insides to other people's outsides all the time andeverybody curates their image on Instagram and looks like they live in their best life.

(13:35):
And it's easy to feel like, you know, there's something wrong with you.
to the point where they stage entire things to make it seem like this is the thing whilethey're not, it's, uh there's a very scary sci-fi aspect to it, which I think is even
Black Mirror has done one or more episodes about this, way that social media kind of rulesour lives.

(13:59):
But I'm gonna get into the facts of Madison real quick for you guys.
I found out about this case right after it happened in 2014.
this news item about it and was struck by how did this happen?
What was happening with this girl that she took her life and in such a shocking way.

(14:24):
Okay, anyway, so as I said, Madison was a successful track athlete, soccer athlete aswell, but track is what took her to the Ivy Leagues.
She's from New Jersey, straight A student and uh
Initially, she appeared to be thriving.
She had a perfect social media presence.
Inside though, was struggling.

(14:46):
started to, she was feeling anxiety and depression.
And the transition to college was really, really hard for her.
She was losing weight and I think really struck by the contrast of her high school and therhythm and pattern she was in with just, she'd study, she'd get A's.

(15:15):
Study for the test, get A's, University of Pennsylvania.
She finished her first semester with a 3.5.
which is fantastic to anybody else, not to her, because she was a 4.0 student.
And so she saw that as failure.
When she was on the track team at UPenn, she also was top, top notch in her high school.

(15:37):
I mean, we see this time and time again with high school students that are recruited fortheir sport to college, and they realize that they're no longer the star there, maybe if
they're lucky middle of the pack.
And that's where she was kind of
sitting right in middle of the pack.
So she was dealing with the elevated pressure of her, uh you know, track life at Penn andthe academics at Penn.

(16:05):
And she was very, very anxious, feeling out of sorts.
And she went home for a Christmas break.
Well, prior to that, she went home for Thanksgiving and,
revealed to her family that she was not feeling right.

(16:25):
A lot of people were telling her like, hey, listen, know, this is normal.
This is normal.
Her sister, her older sister had gone to Penn State, uh struggled, hated it, feltdepressed there, transferred to University of Alabama.
And it was like night and day, she was happy.
So her family understandably thought, okay, well, Madison, maybe Penn isn't for you.

(16:46):
Maybe you should go back.
She had been recruited and she had...
given a verbal commitment to Lehigh University, which is, I think it was a Division IIschool, less pressure for soccer.
Soccer was her true love.
There's this really fantastic book by this writer, Kate Fagan, who had written afantastic, fantastic ESPN article called Split Image for anybody that wants to look that

(17:13):
up.
It's a fantastic read.
And then she took her research further and she wrote a book called What Made Maddie Run.
cause Kate Fagan had struggled with, with depression and anxiety and not sure aboutsuicidal ideation, but she, she speaks at length to, with, with different people about,
about it in the book, but it's, it's a book all about Maddie and her family and how theydealt with this.

(17:38):
But in the book, uh, it's described that the coach that was really recruiting her fromLehigh university just saw in her like a, like a real.
a real talent for soccer.
That was her true love.
And Kate Fagan talks about how soccer was her true love, but she was not going to berecruited to an Ivy for soccer.

(18:01):
this is the crazy thing, like straight A student, not good enough for Harvard.
Not good enough for Harvard.
Quick aside, at Adams High School graduation, I was listening to kids walking across,getting their diplomas, having gotten 4.3.
grade point averages.
4.0 was like, that's it, man.
If you're at 4.0, you're good.

(18:22):
You're golden.
No, that 4.0 was not enough.
Penn was where she was going to be, where for track, even though track was not her firstlove, soccer was her first love.
But her parents were saying like, let's go there.
Like, we'll figure this out.
You don't have to do this.
And the most frightening thing for me, especially as a parent in researching Maddie's lifewas that

(18:45):
Her parents did everything right.
They did everything right.
They listened to her.
They were like, we need to get her help.
We need to get her into therapy.
She saw a therapist at Penn who was kind of, I got the impression, was like, no, mean, youknow, this is normal.
You're dealing with pressures.
This is normal.

(19:07):
And it's a thing where maybe the way that Madison was articulating it, it does soundnormal.
Hey, I don't feel right.
But one of the things that Madison kept saying is, no, this isn't normal.
The way I'm feeling isn't normal.
Just this anxiety, this doom, this dread.
She went home for Christmas.
Still wasn't finding relief.

(19:29):
Even at home, she wasn't finding relief.
And she kept repeating that this wasn't normal.
that she knew she needed to get help.
They found a therapist for her.
They were gonna look for a therapist for her in Philly that was not a school counselor,but like an actual therapist that she never had the chance to do that.

(19:52):
But she had a therapist at home that she was seeing a little bit and admitted, and this ismaybe the scary thing or that in hindsight maybe had they...
really taken what she had said and like held on to it could have maybe saved her.
She said that she had thought about killing herself, but assured everyone that shewouldn't do it.

(20:17):
So they think they held onto that.
And also because everything up to this point with her going, you know, getting ready forlike everything up to college seemed to be going fine.
She had fun.
She would party with her friends.
Lots of text messages back and forth.
She laughed.
The laughing stopped.

(20:37):
So there were these signs, weight loss.
She wasn't funny anymore.
Her siblings even pointed, hey, you used to laugh all that.
You don't laugh anymore.
What's up?
You're so serious.
Maybe the, of these things, of course, you know, hindsight.
okay, there's the signs.
But she, uh she went back to school.

(20:57):
She made the decision to quit the track team.
at Penn thinking that maybe this would help.
But I think that everything kind of she saw as a failure on her part.
So she spoke to the coach, coach was great.
The coach was like, Hey, you know, I get it.
It's okay.
But also maybe we could try this instead.

(21:18):
Maybe you, you, come to practice as you see fit.
Like we can revisit this conversation in a week or so.
And she said, okay, you know, and her, mom and her sister were there for moral support.
Again, parents fucking doing everything right.
Mm.
oh
her, talking to the coach.
And then she decided, okay, this is what I'll do on top of finding a therapist inPhiladelphia.

(21:42):
Her dad had told her driving her to back to school after Christmas break.
He's like, don't have to drive to Penn right now.
We can drive to Chapel Hill.
We can look at that school.
We can look at Vanderbilt.
We can look at all of these other schools.
Like, we don't have to do this.
You don't have to go back.

(22:02):
You do not have to go back.
We don't have to do this.
And Madison, you know, thinking about this immediate obligation she had was like, no, myfriends are expecting me at the basketball game at Penn.
My friends, she had friends at Princeton that were gonna be playing in the game.
And she had promised that she would be there for that.
So there's Madison again, feeling the sense of obligation.

(22:26):
And so he took her to school and she went to the game and...
um
A week later, about a week later, she woke up in the morning, she made her bed and shecleaned her side of the room, the dorm room, which is something that she never did in the
past.
Like she was meticulous in her, the way she would execute things, but she was kind of aslob, like a teenage girl, like at home.

(22:52):
She made her bed.
She wiped her browser history clean on her computer.
She went to the student store at Penn.
She bought some things, she bought gifts for her.
some of her friends and family.
She was answering text messages up until a certain time in the afternoon, then shestopped.
And then she went into Philadelphia.

(23:13):
This is the craziest thing.
She took a picture of Rithouse Square, just of the trees and everything like that.
And I guess the actual image was kind of a bleak one.
It was January in Philadelphia.
And then she put a filter on it.
made everything look bright, everything looked beautiful and perfect.

(23:35):
And like, as Kate Fagan describes it, it almost looked like looking at it underwater.
And she posted it to Instagram.
And then she ran into her, the coach that had recruited her was heavily recruiting her forsoccer at Lehigh University.
And he spoke to her, asked her how she was doing.
know, she said she was okay, that things weren't going as great as she had hoped.

(23:59):
And he,
said he had to be careful about the way that he spoke to her.
Cause you you, coaches can't poach athletes, but he said, you know, in his own way, he'slike, things can change.
Like, you know, you can go through proper channels and there's the doors always opened toyou for you.
And then she thanked him and then she left and she went to a parking garage and she wentup nine stories, put the bag of gifts, including a note.

(24:31):
where they could be found at the top of the parking garage.
And she ran and she jumped like a hurdle, like she had done so many times for track overthe parking garage and fell to her death.
And the note, it's interesting about Madison because she was so very meticulous.

(24:54):
A lot of people wondered.
how she chose this parking garage because it was nowhere near anything that she had evergone by.
But the thing about that parking garage, which I have a feeling she, the reason why shedeleted her browser history was, was looking for methods and also maybe once settling upon
a method looking for a place.

(25:15):
And the interesting thing about that parking garage is that it was the site of like asatellite installation of this project called Passing Through.
which was a collection of just words.
Like what the artist did was play a recorder, like just had a recorder and people wouldpass by and he would, or he or she would catch snippets of conversation passing by and

(25:40):
threaded everything together into this really fascinating, almost like a run-on sentence.
But an aspect in the run-on sentence was the phrase she had wings on.
is very, very interesting and poignant and telling that like Madison, she did, she wasvery, she had, she was a very precise person, but that was the site of the installation.

(26:08):
So it's all along the parking garage.
then like she would pass through those words to go up.
And then her, her note was a line from uh Virginia Woolf's, Room of One's Own.
which I'll read to you because it also, I think, it tells you everything in a way.

(26:31):
And that's the interesting thing about Madison was she was such a person that was a lotmore creative maybe than she allowed herself to be.
She had talked about business, that she was, business was the major that made sense forher.

(26:52):
An Ivy League is where
everyone wants to go.
It's where she should want to go.
There were all these things about the way she imagined her life was supposed to be versusmaybe where happiness was going to be.
And it's just
what she really, truly values and wants in her life, right?

(27:15):
Like, she would have been much happier probably playing soccer, but.
Playing soccer, which allowed an escape from her mind.
And that's one of the things that Kate Fagan talks about in the book, that soccer allowedher an escape from the rigidity of her mind because you can't anticipate plays or you can,

(27:36):
I suppose, but it allowed her to think outside of this box.
It allowed her to rely on
of other things, whereas track was just this race, right?
It's this race.
there's, it's not a, I mean, there's the track team, but you're, you're the one racing.

(27:59):
Soccer allowed for collaboration, which is a kind of comfort in a way.
And that you're also, you're, you know, you're, not playing just for yourself.
You're playing for your team and you're playing with your team.
And it's interesting too, because
Apparently she never got her driver's license.
She was so rigid in some ways, but she didn't feel the need to get her driver's licensebecause she counted on that sense of community of people kind of coming together to give

(28:29):
other people rides.
It come pick her up.
She'd ride with them.
She talked to them, which I feel like is also kind of part of that community, like ofsoccer.
But there's a poet in her.
There was a poet in her because...
the choice in, and I'm not trying to romanticize what she did, I'm really not.
I just feel like it's an insight into maybe the person she would have become had sheallowed that aspect of herself to allow for the uncertainty.

(29:00):
Business provided a certainty.
An Ivy League education, we used to think, provides a certainty, right?
With art, there isn't that.
right, that there's, it's a...
It's impractical.
It's impractical.
Very practical now, but yeah.

(29:21):
And she maybe was too young to know that, OK, maybe you know that the two can existsimultaneously.
You can be a business person who is an artist.
But it's interesting to me as somebody who studied Virginia Woolf in college that.
She she went into this parking garage.
That on the the on the entire side of the parking garage.

(29:45):
was essentially a stream of consciousness of writing.
And Virginia Woolf innovated that stream of consciousness style of writing and that shechose this quote from Virginia Woolf.
Madison's note said, I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out.

(30:06):
And I thought how it is worse perhaps to be locked in.
Mmm.
And so maybe it's a coincidence, but Madison had a hard time articulating what was goingon with her.
And she was a big fan of language and words and quotes.

(30:29):
And that quote, I think shows this need to be, being afraid of being locked out of thisidea of perfection and then saying,
you know, worse perhaps is to be locked in, locked into this idea of perfection.

(30:50):
And the rest of the note is simply her saying, this is for you, you know, this book, thisthing is for grandma and grandpa, this thing is for, know, uh and then included in this
book, there was a book that she put in there that was a, it was a fictional story about agirl named Amelia who,

(31:12):
everyone thinks jumped off of a building to her death.
And then through the story, you find out she was pushed.
So it's not that Madison was saying, somebody came and pushed me, but I think that thepush was from pressure, right, for her.
Did she write that story?
It's an actual, it's a novel.

(31:33):
It's a thriller, but I think maybe the point of it or the point she was trying to make isthat everyone thought Amelia was this one way.
However, the truth is nothing was as it seemed.
And so I think Madison's saying, I'm not what you think I am.
ah She also included a picture of herself as a little girl holding a tennis racket, whichI think hearkens back to.

(31:59):
happier times and maybe her saying, just remember me this way.
She told her parents, she told everyone she loved them and she apologized.
And there's something also incredibly symbolic about, um and again, for anyone that thinksthat maybe I'm romanticizing this or trying to make it, it's a way to understand that this

(32:21):
is just speculation on my part, but there's something symbolic about running and jumping,running like she had done so many times.
with track and that the running led to her death, right?
Running and jumping led to her death.
That it killed her.
That this pressure for that killed her.
The pressure to be perfect killed her.

(32:43):
But ultimately, I think what was happening with Madison is there was, it seems as thoughshe was actually struggling with a chemical imbalance made worse by
the pressure to succeed and the pressure to be perfect.
uh The darkness and the apathy and the anxiety was something that it seems as though couldhave been treated, caught in time.

(33:11):
But this was a thing where it so much happened and there was so little time to treat it.
So ah there's a man in the book, What Made Maddie Run by Kate Fagan that she describeshim.
He studied suicidology and he said that you can think of suicide as cancer.

(33:40):
That sometimes people have cancer and they are able to overcome it, they're able to treatit.
And there's some people that have cancer and they realize they have cancer.
and it kills them immediately, right?
The prognosis is incredibly, incredibly short.
And then there are those people who have cancer that they're battling it for so long untileventually they succumb to it and that you can think of suicide the same way.

(34:09):
So yeah, there's, she had everything going for her as far as a family that really, reallyloved her a lot.
uh, friends that really loved her a lot.
But at the same time, when she was sort of trying to share how she was feeling,understandably, the people around her didn't understand because they weren't feeling that.

(34:36):
And then it's, it's worth mentioning that her father on his side of the family, he saidthat, that, that mental illness or depression, again, you and I will talk later about
defining mental illness, but that it ran on his side of the family.
Mm-hmm.
But what's your takeaway from what you read about Madison and about Madison's condition?

(35:01):
I just learned a lot from you because I didn't do a ton of research into their lives.
I'm struck by how we're all walking around with so much going on inside of us that peoplemay or may not know about.
We used to joke around when I was training to be a therapist.

(35:25):
It was like, the mind is a scary place.
Don't go in there alone.
And it made me think about being trapped in your mind.
in a way, you know, it's funny because the love of language, like I see the reason why wesuffer so much as humans is basically because of language and how we have language and how
we have a mind that can associate anything to anything at any time.

(35:49):
And then
You know, like we could do walking around and we hear a song and then we remember, youknow, our mom's terrible death or, you know, it's like we can be struck by these things
all the time.
And we're always sort of having to contend with this mind that's symbolic.
You know, it's like, if I, like, if I told you right now to take a, imagine taking a lemonand like squeezing it into your mouth and drinking the juice, we would all have like,

(36:15):
we'd.
probably salivate, we probably have memories, we probably have sense, sense memory, andthat's the way our mind works.
So like a thought is not just a thought, it's like uh a lot, you know, like, and itconnects to feelings, and we're constantly being batted around by our minds.
And if you don't have the right tools to be able to navigate that, you spend your wholelife kind of tangled up.

(36:41):
like wrestling with thoughts and feelings in this way and being taken away into thetornado of, know, and depression is so, such a rumination kind of thing, disorder.
I don't want to even want to say disorder, like, you know, such a, rumination is such abig part of it.
And I can just imagine her stuck in there on a loop, believing every thought she's having,right?

(37:03):
I'm not good enough.
This is not good enough.
Whatever the feelings were about being kind of in the middle.
being mid when you're used to being on top and just not having any tools to deal with it.
And to me, the greatest tragedy is I think suicide is completely preventable.
think that, you know, if systems like schools, there's a zero suicide movement and I canput links in the show notes about it, there's a great, let's see, he's a social worker.

(37:33):
Let me just share a little bit about him real quick.
So his name is Jonathan Singer and he has a
a podcast called the Social Work Podcast.
And um he's big in the Zero Suicide Movement.
they try to work with schools and companies and organizations and even like fields wherethere's a lot of suicide.

(37:55):
Like there's a lot of suicide in veterinarians and there's a lot of suicide inconstruction.
And so they try to get into organizations and
prepare and train people and support them to recognize the signs and to intervene.
And it really takes like a community to help someone.
You can't just like have one hour of therapy a week and deal with something like majordepressive disorder with suicidal ideation and you know, and so anyway, there are

(38:24):
resources available.
I just think that somehow she didn't have a net and they didn't get in quick enough.
you know, and she didn't let them in maybe, but it's tragic because it's completelypreventable, I believe.
And I think her fuse was just too short.

(38:45):
You know, she just got whatever it was that she was feeling, it feels like she was on firewith it.
And she just, the best option she could come up with was what she did.
And that just makes me sad because these feelings that she was having are not permanent.
And
she must have felt like they were.
And suicide makes a lot of sense if you think, if you're in pain and you think that thatpain's never gonna go away.

(39:12):
It makes total sense that someone would do that.
But it's just false that it will never go away in her case.
living under the pressure of, and this is the thing too that's remarkable too about likehow we develop as human beings because your parents can be great.
Your schools can be great.

(39:32):
But you can also just not have any instruction on how to be a human, how to deal withthoughts and feelings.
you can have your parents treating you one way.
I was thinking of an example this morning.
Let's say she was really good at soccer.
And one time she screwed up a game.
And then she looked around, and nobody punished her or anything.
But she saw her dad's face, and he had a look of disappointment on his face.

(39:55):
Because he was disappointed.
So what she does with that is totally up to her.
individual people do with that is different.
And so like, she could have taken that in and said, oh, he's disappointed in me.
I have no value.
I, you know, I'm only valuable or I'm only lovable when I do well.

(40:16):
And she could have like formed these things without checking it out with anyone, justmaking assumptions by reading her environment.
And, know, and then she's off to the races with this, this sort of formation of this sortof um network of like,
my parents only love me when I do well.
I'm a disappointment when I don't do well.
If I'm a disappointment, then my parents are, or then I have no value or whatever.

(40:40):
She makes a bunch of meaning of it, right?
And that stuff's, that's how we develop.
And so we often live with these sort of rules and connections about our worth, how we havevalue in the world and what.
being me is and what being me in relationship with people is.

(41:03):
I can just imagine that.
And her parents could have been totally fine.
Or they could have been punitive in some way.
Who knows?
I don't know.
Did they punish her?
Did they say things to her that made her think I'm less than if I'm
impression is absolutely not that, which is what is also jarring about this case is herparents were fucking awesome.

(41:31):
Like I wish they were my parents.
And the mom too, like, like, her sibling, like they all loved her very much.
But what one thing that stood out to me, and again, you know, I'm not a therapist.
I never knew Madison just based on the things that I read.

(41:53):
It seems as though she was also dealing with some OCD, ah which tracks with also this kindof rigidity about, she finds out I'm a star athlete, gotta get even better.
Like she would run laps around her backyard, around the goal.

(42:16):
Like she was rigid.
her eating, which Kate Fagan said, there's nothing, no one said anything about her havingdisordered eating, but she was very conscious of what she ate.
And then the one thing that stood out to me is when she would like be walking to school,she would track how long it took and then try to beat that time each time she went, which

(42:42):
as someone who's diagnosed OCD, that's...
makes me think of that, which would also play into this idea of it has to be this way ornothing at all.
I can't help but wonder too, she had applied to Harvard, she didn't get into Harvard.
Penn was the only Ivy she got into.

(43:06):
If she wasn't gonna make it work there, then what is she?
It's her own self-perception, I think, of.
what it is to be successful, what the expectation of her is.
She was always in the newspaper, scoring goals, all of this.
so...

(43:27):
I get the impression too that she was like the superstar, which is not to discount theother.
I don't know anything about the other kids in her household.
mean, the two younger ones were also playing sports, but like she was the one that gotinto Penn.
She was the one with the straight A's.
She was the one that was recruited as an athlete, which is.

(43:49):
so messed up.
It's so messed up how, it's so messed up how her OCD or whatever it is, right?
If you have these behaviors that on the outside are totally reinforced by the culture,like,
Bingo.

(44:09):
No one intervened on it.
Right?
Like, no one could see that that was a problem.
And maybe she didn't let people know.
Maybe that was part of
the impression I have is she didn't.
I think that that was the other thing with her is she had a way of making it seemeffortless.
And also the ways in which maybe as parents, know, one thing that Kate Fagan points out inthe book is that, you know, keep in mind, Madison was one of five kids.

(44:37):
Her parents had a lot of kids to focus on and the oldest, oldest child just had, you know,had a baby or was about to have a baby.
There's so much to younger kids too.
So they were doing great, I think, but they also had four other people to think about.
And so Madison probably had a way of just looking like she didn't need any help.

(44:59):
what she was doing on her own.
That's the hardest part.
of being a high achiever is that your struggles aren't visible unless you let them be.
And then with OCD especially, it sometimes can take a long time for people to recognizethat's what's going on.
And it will swallow your entire life if it's untreated.

(45:21):
It'll just keep.
Well, one thing that now is just occurring to me, sorry to interrupt, is um a lot ofpeople, I think, have the misconception with OCD is that it is, in some cases, it is very
visible.
Like in severe, severe cases, touch the doorknob three times before you open.

(45:43):
Or like they'll think, OCD, like obsessive hand washing, obsessive.
uh
Like um germaphobia is like one aspect, but the one thing with Madison that I'm wondering,and again, this is just speculation and is somebody with OCD, it's intrusive thoughts.

(46:05):
Intrusive thoughts.
then-
And then having to, right.
So that's the part like with ERP, which is like the gold standard of treatment for OCD.
That's uh exposure and response prevention.
So you go, you try and deal with the uncertainty part of the brain, cause that's what getshijacked with OCD, right?

(46:27):
Like that there's this really like, it's harder for people who have like an OCD brain oranxiety brain genes to
It's hard for all of us.
We all hate it.
Like our brains don't like that.
But if you have OCD, it's like that is intolerable, right?
That's where like the ritual comes in.
Like I'm going to fix that.

(46:49):
And you get a little bit of, it reinforces it because in the moment it kind of fixes itwhen you perform the ritual, but then it just comes back.
And so the goal of ERP is to work on, you know, being with uncertainty and doubt.
Did I turn the light off?
Did I not?
Being able to be like, OK, I turned the light off.
I'm just going to go.
I don't have to go back and check.
So part of the work is noticing that they're thoughts, and you don't have to act on them.

(47:15):
But I think that's hard, because some people, there's the detonator, and then the bomb islike, you've got four feet of whatever before the bomb goes off.
And then some people, you have the detonator, and the bomb's like right there.
And to me, seems like she
the
much space internally for her, right, for her to like even allow or maybe she'd beendealing with it for so long and it was so invisible that it

(47:38):
It wasn't feel like if I had to speculate, I think the OCD probably was there very earlyon, didn't become a problem.
It didn't, it seemed manageable, right?
It was also something she probably was getting rewarded for, right?
Because of the straight A's.
She was constantly studying all of these things, the running around in the yard to...

(48:02):
A parent is like, oh, look at my goal oriented, high achieving child out there.
That's commitment.
That's discipline.
We mistake certain behaviors or we reward those behaviors, which her OCD, which is not tosay that every successful person has OCD, but it became destructive or then coupled with

(48:22):
the depression when she went away to college.
Because at that point she, it's almost like the ticking time bomb.
Like the OCD was there and then it detonated once she got to college and was presentedwith the idea that she was not perfect.
That she was not perfect.

(48:43):
And the pain of it, the agony of it, which even though she was finally disclosing to thepeople around her that she was suffering, she seemed like somebody that was also kind of
like,
I don't know, the one that made sure that all the friends were together, that everythingwas good in the group.

(49:08):
It could be that she wasn't, either she couldn't articulate exactly how she was feeling orshe was downplaying it a little bit to not horrify her family.
And then also like even her coach, mean, this is, again, her track coach.

(49:28):
The way that everybody did everything right, chilling.
The coach said, hey, Madison, for like a freshman, where you're sitting right now on theteam is amazing.
3.5 GPA, incredible.
Even though she's getting this positive reinforcement, she set the bar so high in her ownmind.

(49:52):
And our success, we're out of like way, way out of control.
And also the agony of what it took for her to even achieve those things.
And then knowing that when she went home for Christmas break, she still felt horrible.
And that the thought of even going to Lehigh University or Chapel Hill or Vanderbilt, thatthis was like this heavy, heavy oppressive chains like resting on our shoulders were not

(50:18):
gonna go away.
There was gonna be no relief.
She's too young to understand.
and had no point of reference and no one to relate to tell her like there is a solution.
Right.
mean, there's like, oh, God, this is what's so tragic about it.
I'm going to do my thing again.

(50:39):
have like the most, people are going to stop listening to me because I just repeat myselfall the time.
I feel like it boils down again to like, and this makes sense.
mean, whole pain is the problem thing.
m
As organisms, that makes sense, right?
If you get stung by a bee, you're like, ow, that hurts.

(51:00):
I'm not going to do that again.
Our survival depends on it in some ways, but emotionally, it just does not work.
And our lives get ruined basically by our making pain the problem.
And if we taught this in kindergarten and preschool, kids in all through school, everyonewould be so much more well in my mind, because it's not rocket science.

(51:24):
It's like,
You just have to learn to practice to relating to that differently.
And that's an option.
But inside, it was just so tight and tightly wound and so just being batted around by herthoughts and feelings and weird metrics for success that are impossible to reach.

(51:46):
maybe there was something about like, I'm just totally speculating, but she couldn'tpossibly bear to.
appear to other people as mediocre or ordinary or human.
And that is also totally, totally, like reinforced by the culture.

(52:08):
Yeah, and because she lived on Instagram, you know, and she so carefully curated her poststo convey this image of somebody who's doing great, because she wanted all of that to be
true.
And she also consumed so much content from other people.

(52:29):
And of course, you know, mental health is absolutely an important discussion, which ispart of why we're discussing it, but also just
recognizing the culture of over saturation of this illusion that we're putting out that wefeel compelled to put out.
oh
Be perfect, look perfect, be happy, don't get sad, don't get depressed, don't...

(52:53):
While at the same time talking about the importance of, you know, it becomes a selfheight, mental health.
And so I think that there was the pressure of appearances for sure, coupled with this, itsounds like debilitating depression, OCD, whatever, you know, she never.

(53:15):
was able to be in therapy long enough to even get a sense of what the diagnosis would be,right?
And that is the thing, I see it all the time.
I remember during COVID, getting on TikTok and I look at like these get ready with mevideos.
I see these influencers and these palatial homes and looking great.

(53:39):
And this is what I do to reset my Sunday.
And it's like this heavily edited,
cute thing with music and it, you know, looking at all of that.
And I'm watching this and I'm like, I don't have marble countertops.
My underwear have holes in them.
Right, right.

(53:59):
How does she fold that fitted sheet?
How did she do it?
Like, it's every little thing, just, it points to the failure in my life.
And I laugh at it now.
It's horrible, yeah.
The great thing about turning 53 this year is, I give even fewer shits now.
I'm like, whatever, I'm a slob.

(54:19):
It takes me forever to get anything done.
I still haven't fixed the fucking hose out back.
It's fine.
You know what I mean?
but to an impressionable, and this is me even just as recently as a year ago looking atthe stuff going, man, I wish I was that together.
then I, they're probably not that together either.

(54:41):
That's a, uh they set up their camera to do that.
Like, come on, it took them even more steps to get the shit done and to make it lookeffortless.
But to a 18, 19 year old girl that grew up, we grew up, we had the benefit of,
of growing up without, this is the great thing about Gen X is we're sort of the linebetween no computers, no cell phones, answering machines were high tech.

(55:05):
You know, that's what we thought of as high tech, you know, all that.
We didn't have streaming services.
the link between that time and insane progress, technological progress.
She had, she grew up only ever knowing that social media existed and cell phones, etcetera, et
She was born into media saturation.
I I feel like it's on overdrive.

(55:29):
With social media, it's like we have far more opportunities to be sort of pulled into thecomparison game, which is the meanest thing we can do to ourselves.
But I struggle with perfectionism all the time every day.
I just have had training in recognizing that that is there.

(55:52):
m
realizing that it's not going away.
Like that's never going to go away from me.
My metrics for success are way up here.
And I'm always going to have that show up in my work, in my relationships with thispodcast.
It's probably really annoying as my friend.
you know, it's like, you see it, you're like, eh like, why is she?

(56:14):
But it's, it's, I can now see it.
10 to 15 % of the time and say to myself, oh God, there that is again.
I'm I'm like being a total asshole to myself right now.
This is ridiculous.
These standards of being omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent and perfect.
And I got a big pimple today and I was like, I don't care.

(56:34):
But it was work.
You know, it like that thing showed up was like, you cannot have an imperfection.
And I don't know.
I think that's like evolutionary in some ways.
I think that we must have something left over from
like being social and having our survival depending on where we fit in the group andalways sort of assessing our value to the group.

(56:57):
there must be, cause it's ubiquitous.
I think everybody struggles with it to some degree, but some more so.
Like I can have failure.
I fail all the time and I can tolerate it, obviously.
Otherwise I'd be like a billionaire by now and would have pushed myself a lot harder inlife.
But I can handle like,
Failure a little better, I guess.

(57:19):
it's sad to think that so many of us are walking around with this operating in thebackground all the time and it controlling us and our behaviors, Or making our lives
shitty.
It sort of takes the fun out of and pleasure out of everything.

(57:40):
So anyway, I just feel like it wouldn't be great if this was all normalized as like, OK,yeah, you're a human.
You're going to do that.
And it makes total sense that you're doing that.
And stop it because it's ruining your life.
Or keep doing it, but notice that that's happening.
Then don't get so caught up in it.
If she could have just said, oh, god, I'm doing that perfection thing again.

(58:04):
Whatever.
I'll just have to live with this feeling of not being good enough.
And then.
expose myself to that over and over again, and then one day it won't be so hard.
But like, we just don't get that training.
And I don't think she could get flexible enough to really let anyone see what she wascontending with.

(58:24):
And if she did, then they weren't able to really help her in a skillful, effective way.
But it's heartbreaking because it's absolutely 100 % preventable, I think, if you have theright resources and you have all...
community involvement and the schools on top of it.
But if she had OCD in another way where she's like, I can't leave my house, then someonewould intervene.

(58:49):
But if you have OCD and you're just a high performer, people, it's like- oh
they're rewarding it without even realizing that that's what they're doing.
They're rewarding it and reinforcing it.
And it's interesting that, again, that the hindsight thing, one of her last races in highschool, apparently she collapsed when she crossed the finish line, which again is to show

(59:15):
how hard she pushed herself, how hard so many of these athletes push themselves.
and are rewarded for it.
You see that collapsing as a uh sign that you're giving everything and no one is thinkinglike giving too much, which again, isn't to say that when she did that, I mean, that
happens.

(59:35):
That happens.
But it's interesting because right after that, she takes a really great Instagram pictureof her smiling with her dad and.
And that's the thing that from that day, it's the smiling picture makes the timeline onher feed, not the collapsing, not that anyone took a picture for collapsing, but like

(59:58):
there is so much of that language that we'll find out about too with Katie Meyer and withso many athletes is this perspective of you have to suffer.
You suffer for greatness.
You uh have to toughen up.
Like there's so much language, walk it off, just walk it off.

(01:00:18):
And I understand that.
And I think it is necessary to be able to do things like, this is where it's so tricky, islike, yeah, do, mental toughness is important and you do need to walk it off sometimes and
you do need to push through pain and you do need to suffer.
and suffering as a part of life, but it's understanding where the line is and where it'simpeding maybe on the rest of your life.

(01:00:43):
And I, maybe that's, that's the barometer or whatever is to look at how the rest of yourlife is falling into place.
If it's working, if, everything else is going to shit, then it's, then it's not okay.
And it doesn't mean you're a loser.
doesn't mean that you're a failure.
It's just, it's, it's so sad that Madison couldn't see her value.

(01:01:08):
to everyone around her that had nothing to do with her academically, that had nothing todo with the way she looked, that had nothing to do with her athletic performance, that
just like the her of her was more than enough, you know?
And there was some indications like her little brother saying, you don't laugh anymore.

(01:01:30):
Like people loved her laughing and they loved her sense of humor and the way that shebrought her group of friends together.
but that was not, she didn't see that.
Or if did, was like paled in comparison to some other calculation.
Yeah, I don't know.

(01:01:51):
just think about how private these struggles are and how complex they are.
You just never know how people are putting together things in their mind and what it isthat's functioning to.
I mean, unless you can get in there with them, you don't know.
What is the thing that's sort of driving this?

(01:02:14):
That's why I think that there should be better training all through life in this kind ofthing, in just being behaviorally and mentally well.
Just like anything, you learn to your shoes when you're five.
If you learned to do this when you were five, you'd be an expert by the time you were 19.
m

(01:02:35):
Like how would that, how would one, let's say that you were in charge of this program atan elementary school, what would you propose?
Well, they have more nowadays.
They have these sweet programs that come in and teach kids mindfulness.
And they have also stuff like that we didn't have about kindness and friendship andcompassion.

(01:02:57):
We absolutely.
didn't have that.
Not at all.
No.
Like, if there's a kid sitting alone at a bench, there's like a friendship bench now.
you can go sit.
Someone will go sit by them and really
when I was that kid, people pointed and laughed.
anyway, carry on.
Exactly.
Exactly.
So I think there's more savvy now, and kids are getting it younger.

(01:03:18):
my bias is I would work from a behavioral lens, and I would teach kids early that we havethoughts, feelings, and sensations, and we don't have any control over those, that to
learn to notice.

(01:03:38):
what you're feeling, what you're thinking, whether you're getting tangled up in it.
God, it's so complex.
But I think one thing is this idea of context and ourselves.
And, you know, because people are like, I'm fine when I'm at home, but I go to a party andthen I'm like this, and they're freaked out by it.

(01:04:01):
And I'm like, of course, because you're in a totally different context.
And there are all these cues in your environment that weren't there before.
And all these pressures and thoughts and feelings that don't exist when you're home alone,when you're at a party.
But people are so like, that blows their mind.
They know it.
Like we know we're different in different contexts.
But I think we like judge ourselves because of that.

(01:04:23):
But really that's just how we are.
We're contextual beings.
We're born into a relationship and you know, we're impacted by each other and we shapeeach other all through life.
I guess I would just learn, teach people how to work the levers.
I guess that's how I think of it.
It's like, we don't have a choice about like a lot of things and we don't have a lot ofcontrol of a lot of things, but we have control about how we relate to internal events and

(01:04:48):
external events.
If we can have awareness of what's going on inside of us and space to kind of choose ourmoves in life versus just reacting out of
know, fear, anger, anxiety, whatever.
It's about like, we could spend our whole lives learning how to do that.

(01:05:09):
And, you know, there's other pieces like, you know, it's not 100 % of the time that we canactually do that and be present.
But there's also like stuff like self-compassion, like working with actively treatingyourself better, you know, like noticing when you're not and then bring in some kindness

(01:05:31):
into the equation.
So there's a lot of stuff to learn, but it's all learnable.
And we all have our different ranges of how much we're going to be able to apply thatlearning just based on all kinds of things.
like, it just seems so obvious to me.
It was like learning math or something.
And it's not magic.

(01:05:51):
It's like we're all dealing with the same apparatus.
And we all sort of suffer in similar ways.
And
I I just, I feel like a bit of a born again in terms of like behaviorism because it's,really has changed my life.
I've done all kinds of other therapies and I, they didn't help me change my life, but ittakes work and practice.

(01:06:14):
And I think the whole thing is like with mental health stuff, I think people think you'regoing to go into a therapy room and you're going to say some magic words and you're going
to suddenly have some insights and then your life's going to be different.
And that's just not what happened.
That's not how it works.
don't think.
So.
That's so interesting.
There's a couple of things that come up for me with that.

(01:06:35):
And one is what you were saying about, you know, for example, someone feeling one way athome, they go to a party and they kind of, the way that they feel freaks them out because
they're, why am I feeling anxious at this party?
Or why am I feeling overwhelmed at this party?
And they take it as a bad thing.

(01:06:57):
And those feelings, I think that that's where we get.
kind of like where we catch a snag is that the feelings can be so uncomfortable.
And they overtake us.
And then you have thoughts about the feelings and feelings about the thoughts and thoughtsabout the feelings and feelings and then you escalate it.
My coach, I think I've said this before on a previous episode, my boxing coach had told methat uh pain is information.

(01:07:23):
You have to view it as information.
And so these feelings that are coming in are information about the fact that you're in adifferent context.
And rather than letting it overwhelm you, you take it and you go, okay, I'm feelingfreaked out.
What can I do to help that feeling?
Like the other day, a months ago actually, when I told you, whoa, I...
started to have a panic attack and I needed to go, I took myself in the backyard because Iknew that a temperature change would change it.

(01:07:50):
The heat from the sun, because my house runs a little cold, the sunshine, the heat, andthen the sound of the water fountain I have outside.
And then the act of picking up the dog poop that's in the yard that I have to do everyday.
And just all of that helped kind of reset things, which isn't to say that that wouldalways work.

(01:08:11):
I've had situations where I was like,
grasping at straws, I'm like, ah, panic attack.
Sniff the lavender oil.
It's not working.
Go over here and do this.
And I'm gonna do my tapping that I do.
And I'm gonna, until something works.
Eventually, either something works or time runs its course.
And it goes.
But the other thing is, is what you said about behaviorism.

(01:08:33):
And this is so interesting, because I just, it reminded me of the fact when I took scenestudy at Beverly Hills Playhouse.
there was the actor's checklist that you would go through to find your way.
So you have a character, you know, so I'm like, okay, I'm playing, you know, trying tothink of a fictional character from a play.

(01:08:56):
oh fuck, I can't think of anything, but whatever.
um Iago.
I'm Iago.
Perfect.
He's like one of my favorite Shakespearean characters.
He's so terrible.
So like, let's say I'm playing Iago.
So I have the actor's checklist and one of the things is behavior.
And the way for me into a character, I think for a lot of people who studied acting, know,this will resonate with them.

(01:09:21):
But sometimes when you're at a loss, because I'm like, okay, well, I'm not this sort oflike Machiavellian evil person.
uh My way into Iago is through his behavior.
So let's think of actions he does.
Maybe he's...
He's always thinking his eyes are always moving.
He's always thinking maybe he has a tick, know, maybe he's got a tick because, you know,he's an edgy person or uh what's something he can do.

(01:09:45):
He always fiddles.
He always fiddles.
has, he's fiddling all the time.
He's listening.
He's hunched over.
He's kind of hunched over because he's listening to what Othello is saying all the time.
And you find your way in through behavior.
So like with what you're saying, you can find your way out through behavior, throughchange of behavior.
Absolutely.

(01:10:05):
And everything the organism does when it comes to functional contextualism, everything wedo is behavior, even if we don't have control over it, like thoughts and feelings.
so yeah, you find your way out through expanding your behavioral repertoire.
So.
When we get stressed out, so what I say to clients all the time when they're feelingsomething, I'm like, what do think this pain is telling us about what's important to you?

(01:10:30):
Because usually pain is information about something that's important to you, because youdon't hurt if you don't care.
So there was something important to her that was happening, that was either threatened oruncertain or something.
And she didn't know how to translate that pain into like, OK, well, what is this tellingme about what is important to me?
And how can I, given this

(01:10:53):
feeling I have, how can I have this and move toward that thing that's important to me?
So like, the answer with behaviorism is like, when we're stressed, when we're anxious,well, not all behaviorism, but radical behaviorism and functional contextualism is when
you are, when your behavioral repertoire narrows, right?

(01:11:14):
My only option is suicide.
That's a sign, right?
Like our behavioral repertoire does narrow when we're threatened.
or we're anxious or we're angry or we're, right?
And for good reason, it's all survival related.
but our brain can't distinguish between like a saber tooth tiger attack and like a littlebit of embarrassment, you know, in front of a group or something, you know, it's like

(01:11:38):
danger, danger, danger in both situations.
And it's both very intense and we narrow, narrow, narrow.
And then, you know, we, we react rigidly based on whatever pattern is there, right?
We lash out, we...
hide, we whatever we do.
And the key is you don't have to make any of that go away.
Like, it's going to be there, probably.

(01:11:59):
Like, your first response is probably not always your best response when you're understress, but it's probably always going to show up as your first response.
It's just about learning that that's going to happen and accepting that's going to happen.
We don't have to take that away.
In fact, you probably can't.
We have to add new things that you can do when you can, when you, when you

(01:12:21):
when you're, when you narrow, when you're angry, when you're scared, when you're lonely,when you're, and then that's like, yeah, looking, looking, slowing down as a new behavior
instead of speeding up, um, looking at it instead of look, letting it, you know, beinginside the tornado and looking at the world through the lens.
You're looking at it versus through it.

(01:12:42):
Um, all these tools you can use to sort of make a little space between impulse and actionso that you can stop doing the things that are
screwing your life up basically, right?
So you don't punch that person when you get mad at them.
You actually take a breath and say, I need like five minutes before we have thisconversation.
So it's like building new things in and expanding the repertoire, which is so hopefulbecause we can't delete the stuff.

(01:13:08):
Some of it is so hardwired into us.
So anyway, that's my answer for saving the world.
No, that is helpful.
It is interesting because it is like having that distance, that kind of objective distancefrom your experience, even as you feel it.

(01:13:31):
Because obviously like when I'm in the onset of like a panic attack, which is the worstfucking feeling ever.
oh
I've never had one.
Thank God.
dude, you feel like, it feels like you're being shot with adrenaline.
Like this intense adrenaline that, and it feels like you're gonna die.

(01:13:57):
It almost like a mix of a heart attack, but then there's also some like weird numbnessthat happens and ah yeah, it's the worst.
But so like that feeling, exactly.
Like it's not like you can go, hey, this is a panic attack.
I'm gonna go stand over here and it'll go away.
I'm gonna listen to some relaxing music that sometimes makes it worse.

(01:14:19):
The whole take a deep breath shit, fuck that.
No, it's just like make it stop, make it stop, right?
this.
Yeah, I cannot.
Right.
Yeah.
telling myself this is the panic attack.
do the, it's a, I, what is it?
um Fight fear with fact, you know?
So like these mechanisms, like, okay, I'm recognizing this isn't a heart attack.

(01:14:43):
The odds of me having a heart attack, virtually impossible.
So you kind of do that as you're like taking yourself to a new environment and then doingnew things, right?
uh adopting these new, and that it's also giving myself permission for it to not work.
Like I'm like, I'm outside right now and it feels warm.

(01:15:04):
Okay.
Picking up the dog poop.
Cool fountain.
I can hear the neighbor kids playing.
And it kind of slow, it does help to that change or that shift changes things.
Saying all of this, and I know that uh Madison was, uh
who knows, there was definitely some anxiety present for sure.

(01:15:28):
But yeah, the thing you did was so skillful.
what I mean, this is the thing that's so interesting too.
Like we can't really control what's going on, right?
Like the flood of emotion and anxiety and the sensations.
But you can control your attention if you can remember, right?
So you can put your attention on something else.
And that helps, right?

(01:15:48):
To like orient yourself to your surroundings and to take it off of, because you get out ofthat loop that escalates the panic attack.
in some ways, right?
Because if you're paying attention to the sensations, you're worried about the sensations,my god, my god, it's going to, and then you just, you know?
And so if you can just not escalate it by either, you know, with act, there's like a lotof, there's six processes by which you do this, but diffusion is one of them.

(01:16:14):
It's just a made up word for looking at uh thoughts instead of like buying themimmediately, just looking at them and being like, that's a, wow, I'm having that thought.
Like,
I am not that thought, but I'm having that thought.
it's like having your experience so that it doesn't have you, right?
So like stepping outside of the tornado.

(01:16:35):
And it's not that like you don't feel the influence of the tornado because you're sitting,know, it sucks sometimes what we feel, know, oh God, you know, just being a human is so
hard all day long, especially with social media.
em And so it's not like where you're free of that kind of like it's whipping in your faceand, but you're
not in the washing machine.

(01:16:55):
You're sort of looking into the washing machine.
That's that distance.
you're able to, and over time it becomes easier to have a distance from the feelings thatare happening as you're feeling them.
know you can contain them.
You're like, I can survive this.

(01:17:17):
Exactly.
I want to say that Madison's family, they started, it's calledmadisonholleranfoundation.org.
I can send it to you.
I'm gonna send this to you so you can add it in the show notes.
And their motto is basically like, it's okay to not be okay.
And I'm realizing now Shannon that we should probably save Katie Meyer for next week.

(01:17:43):
And also because we're gonna be getting into the lawsuit.
which is it's whole other thing.
In addition to, I mean, this is obviously related.
These are two tragic cases.
Katie had been uh treated for what she was going through.
ah Madison, this was new for her.
This ah was all new for her.

(01:18:06):
Yeah, let's do that.
But I think that's a uh good idea.
we've, you know.
beaten this horse to death.
Yeah.
I know that we should probably wrap up, but one thing I kind of want to end with is howKate Fagan ends her uh article split image.

(01:18:29):
It's an article worth reading, guys.
This is how she ends her article.
A little over a year before she died, Madison posted on Instagram a snapshot of a quotefrom Seventeen magazine.
The quote reads, even people you think are perfect.
are going through something difficult.
The image had been put through a filter.

(01:18:52):
So even that quote that she put in her Instagram, she put a filter on it.
Ugh.
which is so telling, you know, again, again, that thing of, recognize this intellectuallythat this is true.
I still have this pressure.

(01:19:14):
Absolutely.
But that's the story of Madison Halloran.
And it really is relevant to just where we are in this day and age with the pressures ofsocial media and how we sort of, I guess, contextualize ourselves like in the greater

(01:19:37):
landscape.
And we can't get away, like there's so much we just can't get away from.
I don't know, just, I know that it's popular right now to talk about mental health.
I mean, it is an important discussion.
And I think we'll get more into how we define it next week when we talk about Katie Meyer.

(01:20:00):
Yeah, I don't know.
Yeah, I know.
know I'm like, I'm all ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.
Yeah, no, I know it's well, here's the thing.
hope you have a happy day now.
uh Well, I think for one, if we can end on a maybe we'll end on this note.
So if you're interested, especially like mental health professionals, but there's a Ithink more and more we're recognizing that it's preventable, you know, just like they're

(01:20:28):
like 30,000.
flights a day or something, and there are barely ever any plane accidents, right?
I think we can get there with suicide.
I just think that people need to be trained and supported and maybe start to recognizethat it is something that is preventable largely if people can see the signs and can

(01:20:52):
intervene.
And so if you want to check out the the Zero Suicide Movement and there's some other
links I'll put in the show notes.
So you can see the work that people are doing to sort of get into institutions and providetraining and support for people in schools and in medical practices to try to work with

(01:21:15):
this so that we lose less people.
The suicide statistics are insane.
mean, there's like, I think it's the second leading cause of death of people in Americanow.
I'll look that up, but I think it's up there.
Right.
And I think we'll also get into this more next week, but that um the number of suicides umat Penn prior to Madison's, around the time of Madison, actually.

(01:21:45):
this, again, it speaks to pressure, it speaks to shame, it speaks to how we sort of defineourselves ah and our worth and our value as these
I mean, I can, I believe that superficial things, you know, academic success, professionalsuccess, athletic success.

(01:22:07):
And I think we have social media certainly more now than ever to that, that that is, know,that that's, it amplifies, cause we understand that we are visible now to millions of
people.
We put ourselves out there.
Anyone can access your social media and look at you.
that is bizarre.

(01:22:28):
It really is, it's a strange thing and this consciousness of how we present ourselves.
I have such a hang up about doing this video podcast.
I'm glad because we can see each other and I think people enjoy the visual.
But it is so weird to just put your...

(01:22:49):
You've done it so many times.
It's like you've gotten accustomed to it, but it is a wild, weird world we're living innow.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I know guys, I know it's especially funny when I talk about the way we put ourselvesout there and the way that you can find me just with a simple Google search and what I'm

(01:23:13):
doing in that images videos.
But ah yeah, I'm still reconciling that as well.
But it is an important discussion.
And I think Madison really stands as a symbol of like, yeah, like even someone like hercan suffer.
You know, and she did and her family has that foundation.

(01:23:37):
if there's anything that we can, good that can come out of this, it's an awareness thatsuffering isn't just for people who are dealing with financial troubles, family troubles,
friendship troubles, school troubles.
And just because the external behavior.

(01:23:57):
looks.
normal or successful doesn't mean that it's functioning that way for someone.
They might be doing like some two different people could be doing the same exact thing.
And one could be being driven by a sense of like fear of failure, feeling not good enough.
And the other one could be driven by a desire, you know, a pedative, you know, like I wantthis, so I'm doing this.

(01:24:20):
And so you never know just based on what you see with someone's external behavior, what,what, how that's functioning for them.
And it can be.
totally not well.
Yeah.
All right, guys, I think that that is it for today.
Join us next week when we talk about another suicide.

(01:24:44):
next week is Katie Meyer and she did, we were gonna do this, but her story has anotherkind of, we would have been on here for three hours.
Because we're getting into also the lawsuit and some other things with regard to likeStanford University and the way that it.

(01:25:05):
was handled everything around that.
Okay, Shannon.
uh yeah, don't forget to check out the show notes so you can get some links to somearticles about Madison, the foundation that her family started.
uh follow us on Instagram, at Secret Passage Podcast, or if X is your jam, at Secret PassPod, and join our Patreon.

(01:25:34):
if you want to, that would be pretty cool as well.
And I wish I could end this with some kind of a funny joke.
Think of anything.
So we'll just maybe go out and breathe some fresh air and enjoy the sunshine.
Yes.
get off your computer and touch grass.
Yes, and we're saying that in a nice way, not in the mean way that some people are like,go touch grass.

(01:25:58):
I need to touch, I tell myself, I say that to myself a lot.
Go touch grass.
Yeah.
people say it meanly.
Oh yeah.
oh
grass, you're a jerk, you know, which usually they, I mean, everybody could benefit fromtouching some grass.
have like, I get like itchy when I touch grass.
So I'll touch my artificial grass outside.

(01:26:20):
Ahhhh
Yeah.
All right, guys.
Thank you so much.
Bye bye.
Hey!