(FORTUNE Magazine) – Instead of paying up, some late filers are taking their psychiatrists along with their lawyers to explain a new malady to the IRS: the ''failure-to-file syndrome.'' The purported syndrome has emerged as a legal defense in some cases in New York City, where, as it happens, a number of those who exhibit the illness are ''highly respected . . . attorneys at the top of their profession,'' says Elliot Silverman, a tax lawyer . . . Mr. Silverman and Stephen J. Coleman, a New York University psychiatry professor, recently wrote an article on the syndrome in the New York Law Journal . . . Dr. Coleman . . . says he has treated ''six or seven'' lawyers . . . who failed to file their taxes . . . The failure-to-file syndrome, ((says)) Douglas Fizel, spokesman for the American Psychological Association, isn't recognized in any professional diagnostic manual. ''It sounds like this is coming more out of the legal arena than the psychological,'' he says. -- From an article in the Wall Street Journal.