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.

The office where Flaherty writes is one floor down from her movement disorders clinic. Letters run up the back of her wrist. They are one consequence of hypergraphia, the overwhelming urge to write; she writes during manias and edits during depressions. She keeps the illness under control with medication. Jerrold F. Rosenbaum, chief of psychiatry at Mass General, says he used to get notes from her on napkins.

“I save everything she sends me, which I don’t do with anyone else,” he said. “She has enhanced theories of the mind—enhanced in quantity, quality, volume and intensity.” The wrist notes could be on any of a dozen topics. They may be more thoughts on empathic pain, or about research she is conducting on the side about light boxes and creativity in Harvard undergraduates.

In the movement disorders clinic, she follows about 130 patients—the stable ones annually, the still suffering every few weeks. She specialises in deep brain stimulation; electrodes are implanted in the brain to treat Parkinson’s disease, tremors, dystonias and depressions. And she has developed a subspecialty appropriate to someone still struggling with her own moods.

“People can become manic or depressed as a side effect of deep brain stimulation,” said Dr. Anne B. Young, director of the Institute for Neurodegenerative Disease at Mass General. “Alice is a master at managing this.” Flaherty’s explanation was simple. “Neurology and psychiatry should be treating the same organ,” she said.

For Flaherty, each day holds reminders of her dual citizenship. Recently, she was interviewing someone with a rare brain lesion when her cellphone rang. She was needed for another interview across town in front of a class of Harvard Medical psychiatry students. She was the patient.
-ELISSA ELY(NYT)