Mary Sun, MD
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What I bring into the room.
I am a psychiatrist, writer, and educator who came to medicine by way of technology and the arts, with nearly a decade of medical training across Harvard, Boston Children’s, McLean, Mount Sinai, Memorial Sloan Kettering, and Case Western. Currently, I am in the final year of psychiatry residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital & Harvard Medical School, with concurrent fellowships in public and community psychiatry and psychoanalysis. I train in the Integrated Child Track across pediatrics and child psychiatry, and am a two-time Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association Foundation. My specialized education spans family systems, school mental health, adolescent psychiatry, reproductive and medical psychiatry, and cross-cultural mental health, with advanced study in psychoanalysis, biblio/poetry therapy, sex and couples therapy, EMDR, EFT, and ketamine-assisted therapy. I serve on the Board of Directors at the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis and teach undergraduates, medical students, and resident physicians at Harvard.
My path to this work
I grew up without much of a safety net. Medicine, and especially a career in mental health, felt out of reach for a long time. After studying code, finance, and policy, I tried on different careers and settled into a happy life — building software at Microsoft by day and performing art after hours. Then, volunteering with a crisis line unexpectedly showed me what tied it all together. Every role I was drawn to had been about understanding people well enough to make their lives a little better. A decade later, I am grateful to my past self for leaving a life I enjoyed to build one I absolutely love.
My road here was winding, and I wouldn’t straighten it. As a queer, first-generation physician, I have been considered non-traditional in more ways than one. I built health tech to help fix the system as I was training in it, and I read poets and psychoanalysts as closely as I read clinical trials. My histories, and those of the people and communities I love, all shape how I listen, what I notice, and how much I respect what someone has managed on their own.