Empathy in Clinical Psychiatry and Mental Health Care Clinical, Conceptual, and Scientific Perspectives

Empathy in Clinical Psychiatry and Mental Health Care focuses on empathy in clinical psychiatry and mental health care, bringing together the challenging reality of day-to-day clinical mental health work with conceptual and neuroscientific work on empathy. Such an interface is crucial because empathy is both ethically and epistemically central to mental health care. Mental health professionals' effort of trying to understand the distressing experiences of patients will help instil a sense of dignity and respect for their suffering. Empathy is also epistemically central to psychiatry because the knowledge gained through the empathy effort helps to inform the collaborative care plan to be developed with the patient. The book's first section sets the conceptual, epistemological and social neuroscience scene, including and acknowledging empathy's potential risks and problems. Its second section addresses empathy's role in medicine, descriptive psychopathology, psychological interventions, as well as the neurobiological basis of its disorders. The third section examines empathy in clinical situations such as psychosis, suicidal behaviour, personality disorders, alcohol or substance use disorders, forensic psychiatry, and the care of autistic people. Its final section describes the role of empathy in the work of mental health nurses, occupational therapists, clinical psychiatrists, and mental health law lawyers, with a final chapter covering empathy in mental health care interventions provided by conversational artificial intelligence. The book closes with a call to place clinical empathy at the centre of mental health care provision and research to increase effectiveness, outcomes and patient experience.

1 - Historical Epistemology of Empathy
2 - Empathy from a social neuroscience perspective
3 - The problems of empathy
4 - Empathy in medicine
5 - Empathy and descriptive psychopathology
6 - Empathy: clinical assessment and the diagnostic process
7 - Disorders of empathy and their neurobiological basis
8 - Empathy and psychological interventions
9 - Empathy and the care of people experiencing psychosis
10 - Empathy and the care of people with suicidal behaviour
11 - Empathy and the care of people with a diagnosis of personality disorder
12 - Empathy and the care of people with a diagnosis of alcohol or substance use disorder
13 - Empathy, the care of autistic people, and the double empathy problem
14 - Empathy in forensic psychiatry
15 - Mental health nursing and empathy
16 - The foundations of good practice: an occupational therapist s reflections on the use of an empathetic approach in modern psychiatric settings
17 - Mental Health Act law, practice, and empathy
18 - Empathy in mental health care interventions by conversational artificial intelligence
19 - Clinical empathy and the work of general adult psychiatrists

Alvaro Barrera is a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, UK, Honorary Senior Clinical Lecturer at the Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford, and Consultant Psychiatrist at Oxford Health NHS FT. He completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge, UK. He has received three awards for improving safety and sleep on inpatient wards, co-edited the Oxford Textbook of Inpatient Psychiatry, and is interested in the descriptive psychopathology and cognitive neuroscience of severe mental health disorders. He supervises medical students, foundation doctors, as well as core and advanced psychiatry trainees at Oxford.