For Daniel Mason, there s a clear connection between psychiatry and literature.
As a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at Stanford University, Mason has spent much of his career researching the subjective experience of mental illness and the influence of literature and culture on modern medical practices. And as an acclaimed novelist, the Palo Alto native has spent nearly two decades writing fiction and nonfiction inspired by his research.
Mason said his dual career took off unexpectedly when he was a medical student at the University of California, San Francisco. Between college and medical school, Mason, then 26, decided to conduct infectious disease research in Southeast Asia for a year. That trip, he explained, inspired his debut novel, The Piano Tuner, the basis for a 2004 opera of the same name.