Harini Sridhar, M.S.

Harini Sridhar is a poet, dancer, and Lecturer in the Narrative Medicine Program. She recently finished her fourth-year of medical school at the University of North Carolina and is applying to psychiatry residency programs. She received her Master’s in Narrative Medicine from Columbia University and her Bachelor’s from Duke University. Between school, she worked at a therapeutic preschool for children with autism and as a community organizer for South Asian mental health.

Her scholarly and creative work explores the intersection of psychiatry, phenomenology, narrative, and embodiment. She was awarded the Dr. Marc Amaya North Carolina Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Award for her mental health advocacy and essay on Heideggerian Thrownness in psychiatry. With the support of the Columbia Narrative Medicine Post-Graduate Fellowship, she designed a qualitative research study to explore the impact of narrative medicine workshops in the care of eating disorders at a residential treatment center. She also developed narrative medicine curricula for UNC’s Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Fellows to explore how the framework of close reading can complement the DSM-V framework of understanding patients’ stories.