ESPN's Kate Fagan at UMass

ESPN reporter Kate Fagan often addresses issues of bias based on sexual orientation and race, but it wasn't until she wrote about  a promising athlete's suicide, she said,  that she realized "what a privilege mental health is."


Fagan discussed her widely-read story, "Split Image," about University of Pennsylvania track team member Madison Halloran's death with about 75 journalism students and community members at the University of Massachusetts, Thursday,  asking for feedback as she turns the article into a full-length book.

A columnist and feature writer for ESPN, Fagan was a University of Colorado basketball star, who played pro basketball in Ireland for a year before beginning a career in reporting. In 2012, she wrote an ESPN column and later a book about the life-changing experience of coming out as gay to her basketball team led by conservative Christians.

After she finally came out for good five years ago, her writing got better, Fagan said. She was no longer bitter and inside herself too much, she said. She could listen better and be more empathetic.

But it wasn't until writing about Halloran's death that she considered "the privilege of waking up every morning and at least being content to be alive," Fagan said.

Halloran was an apparently fun-loving person until she went to UPenn on a track scholarship. Although the photos she posted on Instagram gave the impression she was happy, she suffered from depression and jumped from a parking garage to her death after a few months at college.

In an ESPN video Fagan showed, Halloran's father acknowledged there was mental illness in his family, the most difficult aspect of the story to discuss with the family, because of the stigma attached to mental illness, Fagan said. In the book she is working on now, she plans to research the mental health treatment options available to college students, and she said she was eager to hear perspectives from the UMass students in the audience.

Another angle of the story that interests Fagan is the disparity between people's digital life, the snapshots from their life they post online -- and the gaps in between. After "Split Image" was published Halloran's family gave Fagan access to her computer, allowing Fagan to read Halloran's messages to friends. Halloran didn't tell her friends how depressed she was, often adding "lol," "ha, ha, ha" or an  emoji of a monkey covering its eyes to her messages.

Fagan asked students whether the gap in Halloran's digital and her real life is as significant as she thinks it is to the story.

In her own life, Fagan said, she's "kind of having an existential crisis about being online so much. Sometimes you need to give your brain time to think."

After her talk, a long line formed of students eager to talk to Fagan.