Empathy in Clinical Psychiatry and Mental Health Care

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.

• Alvaro Barrera: Introduction Section 1: Historical, Conceptual, and Neuroscience Matters 1: Ivana Markova: Historical Epistemology of Empathy 2: Idalmis Santiesteban: Empathy from a social neuroscience perspective 3: Sarah Songhorian: The problems of empathy Section 2: Empathy in Medicine and Mental Health Care 4: Stewart Mercer: Empathy in medicine 5: Femi Oyebode: Empathy and descriptive psychopathology 6: Femi Oyebode: Empathy: clinical assessment and the diagnostic process 7: Stephanie D. Preston: Disorders of empathy and their neurobiological basis 8: Bryony Insua Summerhays: Empathy and psychological interventions Section 3: Empathy and the Care of Some Patients Groups 9: Richard Lakeman: Empathy and the care of people experiencing psychosis 10: Karen Lascelles: Empathy and the care of people with suicidal behaviour 11: Lisle Scott: Empathy and the care of people with a diagnosis of personality disorder 12: Gail Critchlow: Empathy and the care of people with a diagnosis of alcohol or substance use disorder 13: Elizabeth Sheppard: Empathy, the care of autistic people, and the double empathy problem 14: Robert Cornish: Empathy in forensic psychiatry Section 4: Empathy in Some Mental Health Care Contexts 15: Carol Gee: Mental health nursing and empathy 16: Jonathan Gibbons: The foundations of good practice: an occupational therapist s reflections on the use of an empathetic approach in modern psychiatric settings 17: Lisa Vaughan: Mental Health Act law, practice, and empathy 18: Jana Sedlakova, Andrea Ferrario, and Manuel Trachsel: Empathy in mental health care interventions by conversational artificial intelligence 19: Alvaro Barrera: Clinical empathy and the work of general adult psychiatrists Alvaro Barrera: Final remarks

This is an essential document-required reading for all the practitioners represented by the contributors, as well as social workers and counsellors.