Increasing emotional support for healthcare workers can rebalance clinical detachment and empathy

Healthcare professionals are confronted with patients’ emotional traumas such as grief, anger, and loneliness on a daily, if not hourly, basis. Faced with this kind of distress, we might exhibit (and experience) what I will call ‘true empathy.’ This kind of empathy involves feeling another’s emotions oneself as an ‘emotional resonance’, rather than just correctly acknowledging them.1 Alternatively, we may exercise ‘clinical detachment’, a conscious choice to numb ourselves to emotional resonance with our patients in order to maintain scientific objectivity, and to help us cope, to carry on for the benefit of the next patient in line. Although true empathy and clinical detachment must be mutually exclusive in their purest forms, the choice between them is a false dichotomy. For the majority of clinicians, their response to emotional trauma will lie somewhere between the two, held in an uncomfortable equilibrium governed by cultural or institutional belief systems and competing doctor and patient agendas. At their extremes, true empathy and clinical detachment hold potential for unintended progression to emotional exhaustion or a generalised emotional detachment, respectively, both viewed …