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.
