Tommy McHugh had an irresistable urge to paint after suffering a stroke.
(Caroline Borge/ABC News)
Flaherty had more than the usual empathy for a person in Tommy McHugh's circumstance, because she, too, once had been under the sway of a creative compulsion in the form of hypergraphia-- a need to write that is intense and overpowering.
"I wrote on my arm, I wrote on toilet paper in the bathroom when I couldn't find anything else. I tried to write on my arm once when I was bicycling," she said.
Her compulsion was not caused by a stroke. The onset of Flaherty's hypergraphia followed a tragic event -- the premature birth of twin boys, neither of whom survived.
"At the time everyone interpreted this as a grief reaction, and I sort of did too. But it felt so much different from that," she said. "I just had to write all the time, I had to write everything down because I didn't want to forget it, it was so important."
Flaherty believes the origins of her hypergraphia were both biochemical and emotional, and she has treated them with medications. In an attempt to help herself and others, she also wrote a book about it called "The Midnight Disease."
So when Tommy McHugh's letter arrived on her desk, she not only was uniquely qualified to explain his brain trauma, but also to befriend him.
Because of McHugh's criminal past, he couldn't get a visa to come to the United States to see Flaherty so she arranged to go to Liverpool for a meeting of the minds. They connected with each other instantly and went straight to work, discussing how McHugh's brain had been altered.
McHugh had said that he was haunted by the feeling that he had two brains and that he saw faces everywhere. Flaherty could offer some of the reasons why.
"After his stroke he had a kind of neurological problem called left-sided neglect," she said. "So that, stuff on the left side of his world just kind of didn't exist. He would be looking straight at you, but he'd only see the right side of your face. You can see that a lot in his art, faces that are divided in half, paintings that are divided in half."
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