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Patients suffering with an illness often turn to their doctors for empathy. This is particularly true for those individuals living with chronic, often debilitating, symptoms. An understanding practitioner can play an important role in aiding a patient back to health and impacting clinical outcomes. Yet, according to a study published in this month's issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), mental health clinicians may actually be less likely to show empathy to their patient if there is an underlying, biological cause behind the illness.
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Effects of biological explanations for mental disorders on clinicians’ empathy
Matthew S. Lebowitz and Woo-kyoung Ahn
PNAS vol. 111 no. 50 > Matthew S. Lebowitz, 17786–17790, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1414058111
Mental disorders are increasingly understood in terms of biological mechanisms. We examined how such biological explanations of patients’ symptoms would affect mental health clinicians’ empathy—a crucial component of the relationship between treatment-providers and patients—as well as their clinical judgments and recommendations. In a series of studies, US clinicians read descriptions of potential patients whose symptoms were explained using either biological or psychosocial information. Biological explanations have been thought to make patients appear less accountable for their disorders, which could increase clinicians’ empathy. To the contrary, biological explanations evoked significantly less empathy. These results are consistent with other research and theory that has suggested that biological accounts of psychopathology can exacerbate perceptions of patients as abnormal, distinct from the rest of the population, meriting social exclusion, and even less than fully human. Although the ongoing shift toward biomedical conceptualizations has many benefits, our results reveal unintended negative consequences.
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