Her father turned a hundred years old in December, and the entire family gathered to mark the occasion. He had been a physician himself — a doctor who had watched, from within the profession, the century turn twice and medicine transform from stethoscope and instinct to genomics and telemedicine. Renuka Solanki, who would become Dr. Renuka Tank, grew up in that household in Nagpur, surrounded by medicine as a way of life, not merely a career. It is perhaps unsurprising that she is still practising psychiatry in New Jersey, decades after she might reasonably have stopped.
What is more striking is the route she took to get there.
Nagpur to New Jersey, by Way of Gujarat and Jammu
Renuka was born in Nagpur. She went to JN Tata Parsi Girls High School — where Sujata Sawangikar-Bhalerao was her classmate — and then to St Francis De Sales College for her pre-medical education. In 1973, she entered Government Medical College, Nagpur, joining a cohort that would scatter, over the following decades, across India and four continents.
After her internship, she married Dr. Hasmukh Tank, a graduate of BJ Medical College, Ahmedabad, and moved to Gujarat, where she started a family practice. It was during those years of general practice that psychiatry began to interest her — not as an academic subject but as a clinical necessity. She was, she said, watching human behaviour across every stage of the life cycle, and the patterns she saw demanded a more systematic framework.
She pursued that framework, obtained her MD in Psychiatry, and then followed her husband and children to the United States. The crossing was difficult. She was a trained Indian physician with good credentials and no American licence. She sat the US medical licensing examinations. She passed them — in the first year she applied — and entered a three-year family medicine residency, completing it in 2010. She also worked part-time in emergency medicine during her third year.
“Although I had to struggle a lot when I landed in the US, I am so glad that I didn’t give up,” she wrote.
The sentence is brief. The struggle it summarises was not.
Ocean Mental Health Services
After residency, Renuka chose outpatient psychiatry. She wanted continuity of care — the kind of long-term relationship with patients that emergency work and hospital medicine cannot provide. She now serves as Medical Director for Ocean Mental Health Services, a not-for-profit clinic in Bayville, New Jersey, where she has built a practice that extends well beyond conventional outpatient psychiatry.
She has introduced ambulatory detoxification for opioid and alcohol addiction; medication-assisted treatment for opioid dependence using Suboxone and Vivitrol injections; and transcranial magnetic stimulation for major depression — a non-invasive, evidence-based intervention that has transformed the treatment of patients who do not respond to medication alone. These are not the standard offerings of a small-town psychiatry clinic. They represent a deliberate effort to bring specialist-level care to patients who might otherwise have no access to it.
The work is demanding and it does not pay at the level of private psychiatry in a wealthier catchment area. Renuka has chosen it anyway. The not-for-profit structure of Ocean Mental Health Services means that the people she treats are, frequently, people who cannot afford the alternative. Her father, the physician who lived to a hundred, would likely have recognised the impulse.
The Generation After
Her son is a neurologist. Her daughter Amy works in technology. Neither chose psychiatry, but both watched their mother practise it — across India, the United States, and the particular difficulty of rebuilding a medical career in a country that does not recognise your training and requires you to start again.
Renuka Tank took that difficulty without self-pity and turned it, over the course of a decade, into a practice that serves some of the most vulnerable patients in her region. She works from a not-for-profit clinic in a New Jersey town, treating addiction and depression and severe mental illness, and she says, simply, that she enjoys the work.
The father who celebrated his hundredth birthday with the family around him would, one imagines, have been pleased.