Biological psychiatric problems garner less empathy

Published December 08, 2014

Given more information about the biology of a mental disorder, doctors and therapists react with less empathy for the patient, a new study finds.

The study didn't involve real patients - only short descriptions of fictional cases. Still, it found that psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers expressed less empathy for patients with conditions explained as biological rather than psychological.

The findings challenge the notion that biological explanations of mental illness boost compassion for millions of Americans who suffer from psychological conditions.

Our study demonstrates an example of the downside of the trend toward increasingly biological conceptualizations of mental health, lead author Matthew Lebowitz told Reuters Health.

Overemphasizing this idea that people with mental disorders have something fundamentally wrong with their brains can be dehumanizing, he said.

Lebowitz, a psychology graduate student at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, and his colleagues asked 343 U.S. clinicians to read fictional stories about mental health patients paired with explanations based wholly or partly on either genetics and neurobiology, or on childhood experiences and stressful life circumstances.

The vignettes described people with social phobias, schizophrenia, depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

In one, for example, the biological explanation for a college students crippling shyness was that her mother and brother also were shy, and an MRI technician found a part of her brain involved with fear was more active than normal. The psychosocial explanation instead offered details of the shy students history of childhood bullying.

Overall, the clinicians responded with less empathy for stories with symptoms based on biological factors and more empathy for stories based on psychosocial factors, the researchers reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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Biological psychiatric problems garner less empathy