By Karyn Hede
It's not easy being the poster child for depressed physicians, but Alice Flaherty wears the role with aplomb. She relishes the opportunity to share her experiences with the world. Flaherty was featured in a recent article in The New York Times and in a documentary film on depression among medical professionals produced by the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP), and she openly discussed a major depressive episode that eventually hospitalized her in her 2004 best-selling book, The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain.
Flaherty speaks in a rapid-fire staccato about her still-born twin sons, lost after a difficult pregnancy more than 10 years ago, as she was about to start the residency portion of the Harvard-MIT M.D.-Ph.D. program. A postpartum depression morphed into mania and an eventual diagnosis of bipolar disorder. As a psychiatrist in training, Flaherty was fascinated by her own disease and began speaking publicly about her travails. During that time, she was approached by her peers and discouraged from talking about her mental illness…
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