Empathy in psychiatry


Empathy in psychiatry
Tenzin Diki, XI A Science
Psyciatry is the medical speciality devoted to the diagnosis, prevention and treatment of mental disorders. It has been described as an intermediary between the world from a social contest and the world from the perspective of those who are mentally ill. In its ongoing attempts to define, understand and categorise disorders and determine the best treatments, the medical speciality of psychiatry is always up against the protean complexity of our human brain.
Despite evidence for the centrality of the doctor –patient relation in effective, psychiatric treatment, the current research paradigm of psychiatry has paid limited attention to the role of empathetic human understanding in routine psychiatric treatments. There is increasing neurobiological evidence for the importance of emotional and interpersonal aspects of treatment for patients with mental health conditions. Inspite of the evidence for the importance of these empathetic interpersonal aspects of psychiatric treatment, there has been little recent discourse in the psychiatric literature about how empathy can be effectively used in the day to day practice of clinical psychiatry.
It is generally accepted that the modern English term ‘Empathy’ is derived from the German word ‘Einfuhlung’ which is a term from aesthetics, approximately meaning to ‘Feel into’ an object. According to NCBI, Carl Rogers is perhaps the most well known for his description of empathy in mental health context. He defined empathy as  ‘To perceive the internal frame of reference of another with accuracy and with emotional components which pertain there to as if one were the other person, but without ever losing the ‘as if’ condition.
Empathy is widely endorsed as a desirable quality in doctors and is correlated with better patient satisfactory outcomes and savings in the time and expense. It has however proven challenging to measure empathy in medical practice or even defines it satisfactorily.
In general psychiatry, research attention to empathy has been very limited. A recent qualitative study found that resonating with a person and being available to understand them remains a key element of treatment according to patients but other than a few extant anecdotal account, there has been very little empirical work on empathy in general psychiatric practice, particularly in terms of how empathy is enacted.
This research gap is problematic, because empathy is especially important and complex to utilize in general psychiatry without an understanding of how empathy is enacted and used during the daily tasks of the psychiatrist empathy remains an abstract concept rather than a practice that can be discussed, improved and taught effectively.

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