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.

"It's sort of like you are standing on a diving board as a medical student and you are right at the end and you are doing okay, but then something happens in your personal life and you just tip over," says Liselotte Dyrbye, an internist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and lead investigator of the study, which appeared in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

Science by Karyn Hede, 10/2/09

Tags: depression, Psychology and Psychiatry