Antalique Tran, Timothy Dwight ‘21

Mind, Body, and Soul: Discovering An Unexpected Art Form

By Lena Chan

Before I met Antalique, I never imagined that art could act at the forefront of public health. As technology and biomedical research advance, so does the illusion that capsules and injections can cure any ailment. Even now, amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, we seem to place an almost unwavering faith in the safety and normalcy promised by a potential vaccine. But as miraculous as it appears, medicine alone is sometimes not enough.

Antalique learned this lesson the hard way. As the daughters of immigrant parents suffering from their own ailments, she and her two sisters carry heavy responsibilities at home. A patient with diabetes and kidney failure, her father faces partial blindness, muscle deterioration, and impaired mobility. Although they enjoy the “privilege of visiting doctors and seeking medical treatment,” her father still suffers. He struggles to will himself out of bed and to practice suggested exercises each morning, and as a result, his symptoms persist. Watching her father, Antalique realized that medicine by itself would not cure him—the body would never heal if the mind refused to. 

Despite the disruptions that the pandemic has posed, Antalique appreciates the greater time she can devote to supporting her father. If anything, these moments at home reiterate the importance of bridging the gap between mental and physical illness. Antalique has always been fascinated with human psychology, staying after class to learn about “dreams and the mystery of how the brain works” with high school mentors. These interests, combined with her father’s condition, have fostered Antalique’s belief that healthcare must treat both the body and the mind’s will to heal.

At Yale, Antalique studies Neuroscience to pursue “the question of what we do not know yet” in psychology and medicine. Despite her certainty in her studies, the transition to Yale was not without challenge. The barriers that first-generation and low-income students face are not readily available to the naked eye. The burden of balancing employment with full-time courses and supporting family members across the country—people who live in a different time zone and a seemingly different world—takes an invisible toll upon students who often grit their teeth and push through their workloads. Through these very experiences, however, Antalique discovered new opportunities. As a prior student in the Science, Technology and Research Scholars (STARS) program—an intensive summer research initiative for socioeconomically disadvantaged and historically underrepresented students—she discovered her love for lab work and forged lasting friendships along the way.

Since then, Antalique has joined numerous communities reminding her that she belongs at Yale despite the miles that separate Connecticut from California, her childhood home. In her residential college Timothy Dwight (TD), she surrounds herself with friends who, without fail, join her for early breakfasts and drowsy treks up Science Hill each morning. She finds mentorship in TD’s Head of College Mary Liu —better known as HL—who offers both personal and academic guidance and remains sensitive to Antalique’s realities at home. 

With the support of these communities, Antalique continues to champion social and physical well-being through mental health advocacy and Neuroscience research. A previous intern at the Good Life Center, Yale’s student wellness initiative, she shared techniques for mindfulness practice and problem-solving with her peers. When she is not supporting and instructing others, she studies how endocannabinoids (neurotransmitters related to pleasure and pain) modify synapses in the brain as a research assistant for the Higley Lab. Eager to advance our understanding of brain development, she carries out complex surgical and microscopy techniques to localize endocannabinoid receptors on different interneuron subtypes in mice brains. 

Antalique’s work at Elder Horizons, a volunteer program at Yale New Haven Hospital, has reinforced her dream of pursuing an MD to improve doctor-patient communication and decrease the social stigma surrounding mental health. Just as she does at home, Antalique witnesses “where medicine fails” for elders in New Haven who lack the willpower to heal or an honest and informative relationship with their doctors. To Antalique, “medicine is the starting point for regaining control.” Then, it’s up to physicians to empower “patients to actively improve their own mental and physical health.”

She soon discovered art as a persuasive medium for this kind of communication. While Antalique’s interests in psychology and science have existed since childhood, her passion for graphic design emerged quickly and somewhat unexpectedly. As the production manager of the Yale Scientific Magazine and editor-in-chief of the Yale Global Health Review, she surrounds herself with artists and graphic designers who value creativity as greatly as they do science and public health. By self-teaching graphic design techniques through YouTube tutorials and doodling late into the night, Antalique discovered the power of art to share aesthetic and effective messages.

The expression of these three passions—art, mental wellbeing, and public health—culminate in Antalique’s work with Health Education and Advocates for Refugees, an organization that she co-founded with her friend Ava Niknahad and now helps lead. Antalique puts her design skills to the test by creating pamphlets on handwashing, oral hygiene, and other health topics for distribution to refugees in New Haven. Antalique understands that “it’s hard for people to engage with science when it’s just research.” Art, however, can both “engage and instruct the reader” on mental and physical self-care.

Antalique’s story offers a powerful moral to guide our collective response to COVID-19. While we all hope for the day when a vaccine returns our lives to how they once were, we cannot forget the psychological damage that the pandemic has left in its wake—the enduring socio-economic burdens, the countless lost lives, the concentration of infection and targeted violence within communities of color. And for this reason, I place my faith in Antalique and other researchers like her, who value patient relationships with the utmost respect and promise to preserve both mental wellbeing and medicine at the frontlines of public health.