In this episode, Syra Mehdi sits down with Danielle Li, a graduating medical student from UMass Chan Medical School beginning her psychiatry residency at Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, Massachusetts.
Born in Mountain View, California and raised partly in Shanghai, China, Danielle studied art at UC Berkeley before finding her way to medicine. She shares how relearning English and navigating two cultures sparked her fascination with people’s stories — and why psychiatry became the field where she could bring all parts of herself into one career.
The conversation covers:
- Danielle’s unconventional path from art major to psychiatry
- Staying creative through medical training — including hand-painting cards for loved ones
- Whether psychiatry is an “art”: balancing evidence-based medicine with the nuance of the patient-physician relationship
- Her work with UMass Mind, a community-focused research program serving people with serious mental illness
- A unique collaboration with a local theater company on the musical Next to Normal — creating a psychiatric terminology glossary for the playbill to reduce stigma and make mental health conversations more accessible