Dr. Alice Flaherty of Massachusetts General Hospital has been a pioneer in merging psychiatry and neurology. Along the way, Flaherty, who has struggled with mental illness herself, has built a reputation for taking on patients other doctors have given up on, in many cases after the doctors questioned whether they are as sick as they say. For all of them, getting the proper treatment — pills or infusions or electrical currents — depends on a kind of collaboration with Flaherty, a workshop in which motivations are re-examined, stories reshaped, turns of phrase redefined.
Learn more from STAT: It’s not ‘all in your head’: When other doctors give up on patients, a boundary-breaking neurologist treats them