The Tragedy of Madison Holleran and Suicides at Penn

Family, friends and scenes from Madison Holleran’s Instagram feed.

Doors were beginning to open for Madison Holleran. She racked up straight As, ran track, and pushed her Northern Highlands Regional High School soccer team to two New Jersey state championships. As she entered her junior year in 2011, Lehigh University soccer coach Eric Lambinus became a regular at her matches. Lambinus hoped to recruit Holleran as his center-midfielder, the most physically taxing and important position in his system. “What impressed me about Maddy,” he says, “is that she was exceptionally skilled in the fundamentals. She was very good, and she made the players around her better.”

At home, Holleran mothered her siblings. On the field, she led without seeming to try: first downfield to hug a teammate who scored, chattering to keep everyone’s energy up. Lambinus admired Holleran’s easy charisma, watching as even his Lehigh squad — college students — gravitated toward the younger girl when she arrived from Allendale, New Jersey, on visits. He also noticed something else: “You could just see, in social situations, her being very aware of the other girls’ reactions,” he says. “She seemed to need approval. But you figure that’s something to work on.”

Lambinus thought he had a good shot at recruiting Holleran. But during her senior year, competition emerged. Holleran was also a standout middle-distance runner, and Harvard’s track program flew her to Boston, took her to dinner and gave her a tour of the campus.

“What would you think about my playing soccer, too?” she asked.

These were words no track coach longs to hear. Harvard never made an offer. But the University of Pennsylvania called.

Lambinus says Holleran seemed particularly troubled by selecting a school. Though she offered Lambinus a verbal commitment — “I think she was very comfortable with Lehigh,” he says — she still appeared “unsteady” about the choice.

Lehigh offered the small, bucolic environment she enjoyed in high school, and soccer, the sport she loved most. But what kid knows herself so well that she can announce, at 18, to parents, relatives and friends, that she’s choosing personal happiness, the safer option, over a shot at big-time Ivy League success?

“Could you stop with the drama?” Holleran would say every time her little sister acted like the sky was falling. She was always the mature one, the young girl with an adult’s capacity to plan. So whatever pressure she felt along the way, when Holleran pulled out of Lambinus’s program and chose Penn, the moment looked like a triumph. Holleran went Ivy, accepting a reward commensurate with her young life’s achievement.

What shocked everyone is what happened next. On January 17, 2014, just as her second semester got under way, Madison Holleran trekked about a mile and a half from Penn’s campus to Center City and killed herself. Her death was one of five among the Penn student body in six months’ time, including four confirmed suicides. The tragedies cast a sudden pall over Penn’s image as a dream destination for every high-achieving kid and his or her parents. Criticism centered on Penn’s notoriously competitive student culture and understaffed mental health services. But the question raised by the Penn suicides is broader and more fundamental than any campus policy, reaching into every home where parents send their sons and daughters off to college with big dreams and bright futures:

Why would these kids — top of their class, the elite, bound for success — choose to kill themselves?

The search for answers, and potential remedies, suggests a radical shift — a new way of looking at suicide, our children and ourselves; a more honest way of handling a problem we usually treat with silence.

WE SPEAK SO LITTLE OF SUICIDE that the issue might seem esoteric. But according to survey data by suicide experts, about 10 percent of the country’s college students think about killing themselves (what health professionals call “suicidal ideation”) at some point in their college careers. Almost one percent make an attempt. If these numbers sound small, do the math: Penn has about 24,000 students, meaning that roughly 2,400 of them will suffer so profoundly from a sense of pain or depression that they’ll consider killing themselves; within that group, 240 students will make an attempt.

The biggest dangers are neurobiological: The human brain isn’t fully developed until we are about 25 years old, particularly in regions associated with impulsivity and emotional regulation. In this context, even a healthy kid is likely to struggle with transitioning from the childhood home to whatever comes next. Now consider that mental illness often first manifests itself between ages 16 and 25.

The risk is clear. But what happened at Penn recently still surprises:

Last August, the death of 24-year-old Wendy Shung, a popular graduate student and resident adviser whose kids called themselves “Wendy’s Wolf Pack,” was declared a suicide.

Pulkit “Josh” Singh, a 20-year-old engineering and Wharton business-school junior, was found dead on January 12th in an apartment he rented off campus. Speculation over his cause of death continued until a city health department official deemed it an accidental drug overdose in April.

Holleran took her own life five days later. Over Thanksgiving break, she told her parents she had contemplated suicide. Her father told the New York Post that she’d been happy in high school but that after going to Penn she had “worries and stress.”

• Sophomore Elvis Hatcher, 18, hung himself in his fraternity house on February 3rd, and later died in the hospital. He first confessed suicidal thoughts to his parents at age 15, and had been in treatment ever since.

• Almost two months after Hatcher’s suicide, the public learned of a fourth — Alice Wiley, a graduate student in social policy who died over winter break, just before the New Year.

Mental health experts say suicide never results from one fight, one conversation, one lost job. More likely, a person struggles against some preceding, often untreated mental illness, like depression. Then a series of stressors adds weight until the inexplicable happens. In this formula, no one burden — be it college, Ivy League or otherwise; family and relationship problems; drug and alcohol use — is to blame any more than others. “I think one of the things we struggle against in the world of suicide prevention,” says Christine Moutier, chief medical officer with the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, “is that we’re always trying to explain it. We’re always asking, ‘Why? How could someone do this?’ But there’s not one explanation.”

Moutier and other experts maintain, however, that despite suicide’s myriad causes, prevention is possible. Between 1990 and 2010, suicide rates dropped slightly among adolescents, according to statistics from the Centers for Disease Control. And in a sense, academic success is protective — kids who don’t attend college are twice as likely to die by suicide as those who do. Still, the four suicides at Penn in just six months are cause for reflection on the pressure today’s highest achievers are under: to ace the toughest available courses; excel at sports; join extracurricular clubs; and then find time on the weekends to volunteer.

These overscheduled kids strive for perfection, spending their adolescence collecting medals, first-place finishes and congratulatory handshakes. But when they arrive at Locust Walk, they are suddenly surrounded by thousands of peers who were also the smartest and best. They experience failure, perhaps for the first time in their lives. They feel like they are letting down their families. And just as they are beginning to gather power in the world, they might be at their most vulnerable.

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.

An online petition promoting “The Madison Holleran Law,” to be presented in the New Jersey state legislature, is gathering thousands of signatures, seeking to force universities to publicly report suicides. CAPS also faces pressure to further increase its staff size. A scoop by Penn’s student newspaper, the Daily Pennsylvanian, turned up documents that revealed students often endure three-to-four-week waits for an initial visit — an eternity for someone struggling with the sudden onset of a mental illness. Those documents lent support to similar reports Penn students gave me. CAPS’s 38 full-time staff members are a mix of psychiatrists, social workers and interns. Cornell, in the wake of its own spate of suicides, has roughly 3,000 fewer students than Penn but an equal number of staffers. Even the most progressive aspect of Penn’s response — the mental health task force — seemed inadequate, given that no student representatives were invited to participate.

There are few if any clear lines between the recent deaths and failures in Penn’s mental health services. Little is known about the suicides of Alice Wiley and Wendy Shung. Hatcher fought depression for years, and preferred to see his longtime doctor in Miami Beach via Skype. “Penn had nothing to do with his suicide,” says Lizzy Hatcher. “I think he just got tired of the fight. He enjoyed his classes and friends. He loved Philadelphia.”

Madison Holleran did seek help from CAPS after telling her family over Thanksgiving break that she was stressed and having suicidal thoughts. But Holleran didn’t stay long at CAPS. She attended one or two sessions, with an intern; seeing a senior staff member would have required her to wait several weeks. She ultimately saw a counselor closer to her home in New Jersey.

Holleran’s father doesn’t blame the university for his daughter’s death. But in response to their losses, Penn’s students took to the school paper’s opinion pages, social media and message boards. Wharton sophomore Erica Ligenza wrote of being afraid to confess that she has anxiety issues in such a high-achieving environment. Another student complained that CAPS dismissed her suicidal feelings as a “normal adjustment” to college; she had been on psychiatric leave.

Sophomore Alexandra Sternlicht wrote an article in the DP, “Left to Grieve Alone, Together,” decrying how Penn, unlike Yale, Brown, Dartmouth and Harvard, does not automatically send student-wide emails after anyone dies. Further, students must notify professors themselves when a friend in the student body passes away.

“Not only is Penn’s neglectful response to death an exception amongst peer institutions,” wrote Sternlicht. “[I]t is also unhealthy. And even Penn knows it. According to Penn’s Behavioral Corporate Services, when the subject of death is ‘avoided, ignored or denied,’ the grieving process is compromised. … Penn is compromising students’ mental health.”

Ghose, probably the most outspoken of Penn’s faculty members on the recent suicides, agrees that more action — and honest reflection — is needed. “It would be irresponsible to blame the university for these deaths,” says Ghose. “But it is also true that this is an occasion for the university to look at itself, and our culture, and improve our mental health services. Because this is an elite university. But our mental health on campus is not elite. … And I think the administration should just acknowledge that.”

One student on a Penn-based mental health website dubbed “Pennsive” wrote that after she survived a second suicide attempt in two years, she received a hospital visit from a Penn administrator.

“Are we going to make this an annual pattern?” the administrator asked.

“No,” the student said.

The administrator left then, handing her a business card.

MADISON HOLLERAN AND INGRID HUNG met on campus, maybe three weeks into the fall semester. The two shared at least one meal together per day, and every so often, Holleran declared a “movie night,” meaning snacks — she had a peanut butter obsession — and romantic comedies.

Dressed in a crew jacket and jeans, her black hair covering her shoulders, Hung sits in a Starbucks near the Penn campus. She recalls their last movie date, watching The Parent Trap the night before Holleran died, and their friendship. “Maddy and I bonded around feeling homesick,” Hung says of their usual conversations. “And we talked a lot about just getting through it. ‘Freshman year!’ We would say to each other, ‘We are going to make it at Penn. We will make friends. We will join a sorority. And we will be happy.’”

Hung says Holleran admitted that she missed her family, friends and soccer. She also feared that turning down Lehigh’s soccer scholarship was a mistake. Hung doesn’t cite the pressure of Penn, specifically, for Holleran’s troubles. She says that leaving home and attending any college would have been tough for Madison. Hung also saw her struggle with the burden particular to their generation — to have a great time, always, and post pictures of her revels on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.

“I’m not sure how I’m even going to talk to my friends back home,” Holleran told Hung. “I look at my friends on Facebook, and they all seem so happy. They are all having these great college experiences, and I’m not.”

Today, Hung commiserates.

“On social media, everyone presents a false picture of their life,” she says. “No one ever posts a picture of themselves looking sad. Everyone is at the coolest party. And I think all of us wonder, sometimes, ‘Why isn’t my life like that? Why don’t I feel like smiling like them?’”

The version of herself that Holleran projected to the world online offered no clues to the turmoil she held inside. Her Instagram stream is rife with pretty pictures. And any stress she expressed on Twitter reads like typical schoolgirl patter.

“FREEEEEDiOM!!!!!!!!!!!! Spendin my last day in Philly with my gf before headin home,” she wrote on December 20th.

“VS fashion show is on and I’m in the damn library,” she wrote on December 10th. “Something here is not right.”

There is also a cell-phone video of a November Penn track meet that captures Holleran running a race. She rounds a corner and pulls a muscle, maybe 10 yards from the finish line. She seizes up, then jerks along, fighting, till she can finally throw herself across the finish line.

“That’s my Maddy,” says a family friend. “Tough as ever.”

“I AM VERY LUCKY to be alive,” says Jack Park. He is tall, slim and well-dressed, with dark eyes, a gentle demeanor and a soft speaking voice. A junior at Penn, Park announced in February, through social media, that he had attempted suicide in his dorm room — twice. Park has attained a kind of celebrity in recent months, a fact about which he seems humble, even bemused. “I am very pleased that you are interested in my story,” he says.

Alerting the world to his battle with mental illness was brave enough. But Park also publicly listed his phone number and email address. “My operating hours are 24/7, 365,” he wrote in a Tumblr post, taking what reads like a slap at CAPS, which only added evening hours after the recent suicides. “To make time for these calls, I dropped courses to take only the four minimum credits legally required for international kids to attend Penn. Please, please, do not attempt to kill yourself and call this number if you want to hear me out. Life is so much more beautiful than death. I taught myself this the hard way. … ”

Park took a semester off from school, returned to Penn, and completed his sophomore year before the Holleran and Hatcher suicides convinced him to go public.

“I take medication now,” he says, without a trace of shyness, “for depression and bipolar disorder, and I feel good.”

Traditionally, people who survive suicide attempts keep the topic secret. But these days, Park isn’t alone. Drexel business student Drew Bergman gives lectures about his own suicide attempts. Online, the website Live Through This has gathered more than three dozen testimonials from suicide survivors — teachers, health-care professionals, moms and dads. In April, the New York Times chronicled this new openness among suicide prevention experts in talking about suicide attempts.

In part, these initiatives spring from a growing understanding that mental health should be addressed in the same terms as our physical health. No young adult would hesitate to tell her parents that her knee hurts. But admitting that thoughts of suicide keep popping up, or that feelings of anxiousness and depression are all-consuming, still carries a stigma. The reason is easy to see: A bum knee is just something we have. We believe our thoughts reveal who we are.

Mental health, however, relates to physical workings in our brain. Researchers at Columbia who study suicide have published data showing that abnormalities in brain chemistry and structure are present in the suicidal — including deficiencies in pleasure-dealing serotonin. “These things are treatable,” says Columbia researcher J. John Mann, “with therapy and medication, and that’s what people need to understand.”

Capitalizing on this knowledge requires a bold cultural shift in which parents teach their kids to talk about their mental health as freely as they would a headache. “It’s a new and very hopeful time,” says Christine Moutier, from the AFSP. “All of these people who used to stay in the dark are coming out now, despite the stigma, and putting a face on this issue.”

For now, however, mental illness and suicide remain stigmatized, in part because of advice coming from the very same experts. The “contagion effect” is real: Publicity surrounding suicides can increase the suicide rate, and suicides often occur in geographical clusters, like one from 2000 to 2003 in which six Cherry Hill teenagers took their own lives.

Mental health experts endorse strict guidelines for publicizing suicide: Don’t mention the location or method; avoid depicting the mourning of family members; and resist stories that might make anyone who died by suicide appear attractive or celebrated.

“We struggle with this,” says Alison Malmon, “throughout the community of people working on the issue of suicide prevention.” Malmon was a student at Penn 10 years ago when her brother, a senior at Columbia, killed himself. She founded a nonprofit, Active Minds, to combat mental illness and prevent suicide on college campuses.

“There is already such a huge stigma around suicide and mental illness in general,” she says. “And some of us fear that if we’re too strict about what we should or shouldn’t say, we’re actually adding to that stigma and keeping the subject in the dark.”

People who attempt suicide are usually convinced that all of their distorted thinking is true. They have often spent a long time formulating a plan and display incredible calm, despite the pain they’re in, because they believe they’ve found the only way out. Many are saved, even then, by reaching what could be called a “bend” moment — some unexpected turn of events that makes them rethink the plan they spent so long crafting.

Sometimes a restriction on the means they intend to use is enough: Cornell put barriers around bridges on campus to discourage jumpers, and some hospitals install break-away shower rods to prevent hangings. Penn spokesman Ron Ozio responded to an email asking if the university employs any of these methods by saying, “University buildings are built to existing state and local codes.” But what, exactly, will divert someone from a suicide plan is difficult to calculate.

“Often,” says Moutier, “you’ll hear some story, after the fact, and think, ‘This was the moment’ that might have saved them. But sometimes the person suffering has adopted a kind of tunnel vision. What looks like a rational way out to the rest of us doesn’t look that way to them at all.”

Holleran may have believed that quitting Penn would comprise such a heavy blow that everyone would be better off if she died. In this sense, people like Park and Bergman can be a tremendous resource, not only because they can speak about what they thought and felt while suicidal, but because they’re the figures often missing from stories like this — those who provide, in this dark space, a sense of hope. The fact is, most who suffer from depression or suicidal thoughts survive. Go back to the math: Out of the projected 2,400 Penn kids who will consider suicide, nearly 90 percent will choose to go on.

The answer to reducing suicide — or part of it — might be to simply tell more stories, particularly of people who’ve survived their suicidal thoughts, so that tales like those of Holleran and Hatcher are placed in context. And so we can understand the real depth of the tragedy here: These lives are over when they might yet have been transformed.

OVER THE HOLIDAYS, at Thanksgiving, Madison Holleran told her parents how she was suffering. She felt unhappy at Penn. The academics were demanding. Worse, her track coach required two-a-day practices, even with classes in session. She was overtaxed. She’d thought of suicide.

The Hollerans, in response, took all the expected steps. They got her help — a counselor who told her to call if she ever formulated a suicide plan. When she didn’t feel comfortable at CAPS, they looked for a private psychologist. On the drive from North Jersey to Penn after the semester break, Holleran said, “Dad, I don’t want to go back.”

“I understand,” her father, Jim, replied. “You should look at transferring.”

But she declined. She wanted to make Penn work.

Holleran and her friend, Ingrid Hung, arrived on campus the Saturday before spring classes began. They attended a Penn women’s basketball game. That evening, Holleran told Hung she’d been thinking of transferring.

“Oh, no,” Hung replied. “I knew you were sad, but I had no idea you were this sad. …”

Holleran, seeing her friend’s reaction, stopped the transfer talk right there. “No,” Holleran said, “it’s fine.”

Over the next couple of days, she peppered Hung with text messages: “We’re going to have so much fun,” Holleran wrote. “We’re going to love it here.”

“I don’t think she fully wanted me to know how bad it was for her,” Hung says now.

On Friday, January 17th, Holleran went into Center City. She stopped at various stores and bought gifts for her family. Her dad called around noon. He wanted to visit her. But she told him not to worry. She had sorority rush events, and the Penn track team was scheduled to run at Lehigh that weekend.

She sent pleasant text messages throughout the day. At 5 p.m., she texted a friend who’d been trying to reach her. “I just got back from a run,” she wrote. “Whatcha doing?”

Around 6 p.m., she walked to Rittenhouse Square. The park was still decorated for Christmas. Holleran took a cell phone picture: Big balls of light glow in the trees, capturing an idyll Holleran was unable to preserve or nurture in her own heart.

At 6:27 p.m., she walked south along 15th Street across Locust and felt a hand grasp her arm. She turned and saw Eric Lambinus, the Lehigh soccer coach.

Of course, this was it — the moment when the arc of Holleran’s story might have bent toward life. Symbolically, Lambinus was an ideal candidate to play this role. Decades ago, his sister, a nursing student, died by suicide at roughly the same age as Holleran. “She was unhappy,” he says. “And she was convinced that if she quit school she’d be letting everyone down, and she couldn’t go on.”

That evening, though, he was just glad to see Madison. He wanted her to know he bore no hard feelings over her choosing Penn.

“Madison,” he said, “how are you?”

“Things aren’t going great for me here,” she said. “I’m not so happy, running track.”

Lambinus had to be careful. NCAA regulations prohibit tampering. But he tried to let her know the door was open. “There is a process you have to follow,” he told her. “But talk to your parents. Talk to your coach. … You should be happy.”

Lambinus was in town for an NCAA athletics convention and scheduled to meet friends at Fadó for dinner. He needed to get back to them. But before he left Madison, he gave voice to something that bothered him.

“What are you doing by yourself on a Friday night?” he asked.

In all his time recruiting her, he didn’t think he’d ever seen Madison Holleran alone.

“I was just doing some shopping,” she said. “But I’m meeting some friends for dinner.”

They parted. About 15 minutes later, Holleran reached 15th and Spruce. She climbed the stairs to the fifth floor of a parking garage. She didn’t have to do it. But at the moment, she couldn’t see how to do anything else.

For confidential support if you are having thoughts of suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255). Learn about the warning signs of suicide at the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.

Originally published as “The Penn Suicides” in the June 2014 issue of Philadelphia magazine.