Resident Physician Contributing Writer
University of Washington School of Medicine
Monica is a second year psychiatry resident at University of Washington and graduated medical school from University of Illinois at Chicago. She has long been a writer -- winning contests as an undergrad, contributing to the lit mag in medical school, and now leading the narrative medicine group in residency. She is guided by the principles of grit, thoughtfulness, and intensity, and hopes to live these values by working as a child psychiatrist working towards social change. She writes at www.monicasamelson.com.
At the beginning of my intern year, I bought a ukulele. I started intern year at a sprint, like anyone does, arms full of hope. This was quickly extinguished, lost in an atmosphere so devoid of hope that it all flew out of my arms to settle into places so far apart, it might as well have been floating in the vacuum of space.
I first heard of Yayoi Kusama last year when her spellbinding exhibit came to the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. Admittedly late to the international zeitgeist of Kusama, what initially drew me in was her story — a Japanese-American avant-garde artist who suffered from severe mental illness and successfully transformed that suffering into riveting artwork.
Attending Physician Guest Writer
George Washington University School of Medicine
Dr. Pooja Lakshmin is an attending psychiatrist and Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at the George Washington University School of Medicine. She specializes in women’s mental health and perinatal psychiatry. She is interested in gender, stigma and studying the experiences of women who suffer from depression and anxiety. She is passionate about humanism in medicine. She can be found on twitter @PoojaLakshmin and on her blog www.poojalakshmin.com.
