Mitashi is a Resident Doctor in Psychiatry in the Thames Valley Deanery. She studied medicine at Kasturba Medical College, Mangalore, and then worked in several specialties in hospitals across India.
Before medical school she studied life sciences at the postgraduate level, completing an MSc in Biology at the University of Oxford and an MS in Basic Medical Sciences at New York Medical College. Her interest in behaviour spans the evolutionary pressures that have shaped it and the cellular mechanisms that encode it.
As a Johns Hopkins Lives in Medicine visiting scholar at the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing (OCLW), she is writing a memoir anchored in the human body. She comes to it as multiple people at once: a patient with a chronic endocrine condition; a medical student who had to deconstruct a body to learn how it works; a scientist who marvels at the design of the systems it houses; and a physician who must minister to it as best she can. An unexpected bereavement added a fifth identity, that of a young widow. She found herself facing death’s paradox: that the body could cease to exist and yet the life it contained would somehow persist in everything and everyone it had touched. The project would not be complete without giving death its due consideration. The book has since evolved to include the deaths that have shaped her and irrevocably changed her understanding of what it means to belong to a body.
Over her term at OCLW, she hopes to contribute to conversation between the humanities and clinical practice. She is interested in how our narratives heal us, and in what might be built from that. To this end, she is working on designing AI-based tools that could work as therapeutic interventions in psychiatry.
