Dr Alice Flaherty became manic after she delivered stillborns. Her bipolar disorder helps her understand the neuroanatomy of empathy

By 35, Dr. Alice W. Flaherty had led a life of traditional over-accomplishment: undergraduate and medical degrees from Harvard, a Ph.D. in neuroscience from MIT, research in movement disorders, articles in leading neurological journals.

Then, in 1998, she delivered stillborn twin boys. In the grief that followed, she grew manic: poetic, metaphorical and long-winded. She wrote everywhere, up and down her arm, over and under any serviceable piece of paper. She also wrote neurology handbooks, autobiographical meditations and, in 2004, a best-seller, The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block and the Creative Brain (Houghton Mifflin).

Her grief eventually subsided. Her newly uncovered bipolar disorder did not—to the benefit of her patients. Flaherty, 45, is director of the movement disorders fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital and an assistant professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School. But those technical descriptors do not begin to capture the way she uses the racing mind of her manic phases to drive her ideas into highly personal treatments.

These days, Flaherty is preoccupied with the neuroanatomy of empathy—especially the mirror neuron system in the insula, cingulate and inferior frontal parts of the brain, which become active when one person witnesses another experiencing emotion. The routes to her interest were interconnected and highly personal.

“What made me empathic was my depression,” she said recently. “People’s emotions were pounding me in the face. But the depressions help the doctor aspect of me.” When Flaherty lost her first set of twins (she and her husband have healthy twin daughters), she experienced a natural yearning for empathy from her own doctor.

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