Phenomenology of Suicide by Maurizio Pompili

Author:Maurizio Pompili
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

6.7.3.3 Third Step, Analysis of Empathic Data

Immediately after the empathic moment, it is necessary for the clinician to recover his cognitive analysis capacity and interpret the emotional information gathered at the previous step. In order to do it, the clinician needs to deregulate empathic resonance, so that he can intentionally shift his focus of attention on elements external to the environment, change posture or move to another task, such as counting since, as we have seen, this task can downregulate the empathic response. At that point, the analysis of empathic information is cognitive, based on the memories gathered some instants before, which complement other information in his possession.

Conclusions

We believe that empathy, if understood in its characteristic mechanisms and rules, can turn into a powerful tool available to the clinician, who has to deal with difficult situations and patients.

The suicidal individual is a particularly challenging category of patients, for whom the emotional dimension plays a key role in the genesis of their suffering, perceived as intolerable. Accordingly, we believe that the clinician that strategically equips himself with greater ability and knowledge of the empathic function, which is our window to other’s emotions, ensures a precious help in the management of this type of patients.

Also, it is important that, in the future, efforts are devoted to make the patient-clinician relationship more scientific and predictable. First, in order to optimise the therapeutic results thanks to a better investigation ability on the patient. Secondly, it is now supported by evidence that the patient’s health cannot be obtained only through treating pathologies, but mandatorily by treating the entire person, both in the physical, emotional and cognitive spheres (Davidson et al. 2003). In this direction, the relationship with the clinician is of great importance, given the power that this relationship has to trigger emotions in the patient, emotions that, in turn, reflect on physiological states and that can positively or negatively affect the underlying pathology.

Finally, we believe that this effort is urgent, in order to adequately respond to the increasing sense of distrust that people manifest towards clinicians, which is leading to such phenomena as the stigmatisation of science and evidence-based medicine or as the bad habit to have a do-it-yourself healthcare only relying on anecdotal information available on the web.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.