Dr. Mantri's Story

Translated from Latin, patient means “one who suffers.” But for Dr. Sneha Mantri, suffering does not tell the full story.

“A lot of time we talk about diseases in terms of loss and sadness and pity,” she says. “But there is also a lot of resilience and creativity and grit that my patients show me every day.”

As an Associate Professor of Neurology and Parkinson’s disease specialist at Duke University School of Medicine, Dr. Mantri focuses on narrative medicine and where it lies at the intersection of medicine and the humanities, where diagnosis is only the beginning of understanding a patient. Her work asks clinicians to look beyond disease and recognize the person living within it.

Movement disorders were never part of Dr. Mantri’s original plan. She had little personal exposure to neurological disease growing up and entered college searching for a steady, clearly defined career that could make a tangible difference in people’s lives. By the middle of college, medicine increasingly seemed to offer that path.

During medical school, Dr. Mantri completed a health policy internship at the American Academy of Pediatrics and imagined herself eventually practicing primary care. Her preclinical neuroanatomy course only seemed to drive her away from neurology. Filled with rote memorization of complex neural pathways and little clinical context, the class left her struggling to see how the diagrams on the page connected to the people she hoped to care for.

Yet, her first clinical rotation at the neurology department changed everything.
“Seeing the manifestation of all those complicated diagrams, and the ways that real people were impacted by illness, was a game changer,” Dr. Mantri recalls.

Suddenly, what had once appeared abstract became deeply human. She realized that the pathways she had memorized truly shaped how someone experienced the world. Dr. Mantri explored several areas within neurology, including pediatric neurology, before discovering that adult neurology—and eventually movement disorders—felt like home.

Her interest in the humanities had begun even earlier. As an undergraduate, Dr. Mantri took a Literature and Medicine course, receiving her first formal introduction to what would later become a defining part of her career: narrative medicine. That interest continued to deepen, eventually leading her to become the first medical student in the country to earn a master’s degree in narrative medicine.

Dr. Mantri’s own medical school experience, however, proved to be very challenging. The cutthroat environment depersonified medicine and did not support rising clinicians, headed for burnout. Students constantly competed with each other for grades, evaluations, and letters of recommendation. Dr. Mantri often felt pressure to adjust herself to fit what the environment expected.

Narrative medicine offered another possibility.

When she arrived at Duke to complete her clinical training, Dr. Mantri became committed to building a stronger narrative medicine presence within the medical school. The work restored a sense of purpose that could easily become obscured beneath examinations and clinical demands. She wanted students and physicians to feel that they belonged in medicine without sacrificing the individuality that brought them there in the first place.

The same principle extends to patients.

Narrative medicine creates space for people to become more than diagnoses, symptoms, or entries in a medical chart. By listening to the stories patients tell, clinicians can better understand how illness fits into the larger context of a person’s life.

For Dr. Mantri, some of her most important lessons in patience and listening have come directly from people with Parkinson’s disease.

“A lot of time people with PD need extra time to think of what they want to say, or have trouble forming the right words even if they know what they want to say,” she explains. “Many times, doctors or other health professionals, or family members, will interrupt in order to ‘hurry things up,’ and often we get it wrong. I am very comfortable waiting in the interstitial space….”

In a healthcare system where time is often considered one of the clinician’s scarcest resources, narrative medicine may initially seem like an added demand. Dr. Mantri’s work suggests the opposite. Spending time early in a relationship understanding who a patient is can strengthen trust, reduce misunderstanding, and make later conversations more meaningful.

That same approach can also benefit healthcare professionals themselves. When clinicians are able to remember the human significance of their work, it can help restore a sense of connection—to patients, to colleagues, and to the reasons many clinicians entered medicine in the first place. For Dr. Mantri, it helped reignite that connection.

Today, Dr. Mantri continues expanding Duke’s NeuroArts program while working to bring its ideas to broader national and global audiences. She also continues learning from students whose backgrounds span medicine, arts, political science, and the humanities, each offering a different way of understanding illness and care.

Her work with the Parkinson’s Foundation has extended that philosophy beyond the classroom. Through the recent “In Our Own Words” project, people affected by Parkinson’s were invited to tell their experiences in just 55 words. In those few sentences, patients could decide for themselves what mattered most about their experiences—creating stories that offered caregivers and clinicians a window into aspects of illness that a medical chart could never fully capture.

Dr. Mantri emphasizes that at the core of every patient, student, physician, and caregiver is a person, carrying their individual story that began long before they entered a hospital or clinic.

Understanding where someone has been—and recognizing how far they have already come—may be one of the most important ways medicine can support them in how much further they can go.