ABOUT ME

How Do I pronounce your name?

• General Adult Psychiatry
• Psychotherapy - Narrative, Existential, CBT, DBT inspired
• Psychiatry Curriculum Development
• Medical Humanities in Medical Education
• Qualitative Research & Data Analysis (NVivo)
• Visual Ethnography & Analysis
• Patient Narratives, Graphic Medicine

WHat kind of work do you do?

My most recent work is qualitative/mixed methods:
• Experiences of Reddit users on sleep times
• Experiences of Redditors misuse of diphenhydramine
• Psychiatry residents and grief during COVID-19
• Experiences of healthcare workers during COVID-19.

I am also fine-tuning curricula for a medical humanities elective for medical students based on their feedback.

Theory/Framework

“Medicine is a social science, and politics is nothing else but medicine on a large scale … Medicine as a social science, as the science of human beings, has the obligation to point out problems and to attempt their theoretical solution; the politician, the practical anthropologist, must find the means for their actual solution.” - Rudolf Virchow

Social Medicine examines how structural factors trickle down into social determinants of health that influence health outcomes. The cracks in the system are ‘structural vulnerabilities’.

I look for the effects of current/past policies, social hierarchies, scholarship, epistemology, ideology, politics, and law when examining a particular social determinant of health. Within this structural framework, I believe in the theory that people have ‘constrained autonomy’. People have free will, however, the ways in which they can exercise freedom is often constrained by the limitations of their circumstances.

For a deeper dive, Dr. Philippe Bourgois has talks on structural vulnerabilities regarding a number of topics in psychiatry and public health.