Empathy Gaps: Case Study on Bipolar Disorder and Substance Abuse

This case study explores the concept of empathy gaps, which are limitations in understanding others, often influenced by personal experiences and emotional states. The study focuses on a 27-year-old Australian woman named Carly, who struggles with substance abuse, bipolar disorder, and a history of trauma, including domestic violence and psychotic episodes. The assignment analyzes the patient's condition, highlighting the impact of substance abuse on her mental health and the challenges in communication and understanding. It emphasizes the importance of recognizing personal problems and developing emotional intelligence to improve communication and empathy. The assignment also provides references to support its findings and conclusions.

EMPATHY GAPS
Name of the student
Name of the University
Author note

EMPATHY GAPS
• The empathy gaps can be defined as the limits in understanding of one person with
another person.
• The most important aspect of this idea is that the understandings of human are ‘state
dependent’.
• When a person gets angry it is very difficult to understand what a person like to be
calm, and vice versa.
• When a person completely in love with a specific person, it becomes difficult to imagine
the life of not being in love with that person in future.
• People rarely listens or understands the feelings of the other people whom the person
do not like.
• The areas which lead to the creation of empathy gaps are Culture, Social conditions and
socialization, Political, Educational level and systems, Experience of life

EMPATHY GAPS
• The case study is about an Australian born woman of 27 years of age name
Carly who was suffering from substance abuse. She started consuming
alcohol after the death of her mother.
• She was also a victim of domestic violence and sexual and physical abuses.
• She also experienced certain psychotic episodes in which 6 voices were
telling her at the same time to kill her neighbors.
• Previously she was diagnosed with acute drug induced psycho affective
disorder and was also diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
• The substance abuse was the only reason for the patient to suffer from
such mental issues.

EMPATHY GAPS
The ways to improve the communication among the students and other
people are:
a. The major differences among the people must be identified
b. People should know to identify their own personal problems and
feelings and at the same time develop intelligence of their emotions.
c. Asking others regularly about the perspectives and feelings regarding
any particular decisions
d. Using appropriate verbal non-verbal languages

REFERENCES
• Carrier, L.M., Spradlin, A., Bunce, J.P. and Rosen, L.D., 2015. Virtual empathy: Positive and negative impacts of
going online upon empathy in young adults. Computers in Human Behavior, 52, pp.39-48.
• Boissy, A., Windover, A.K., Bokar, D., Karafa, M., Neuendorf, K., Frankel, R.M., Merlino, J. and Rothberg, M.B.,
2016. Communication skills training for physicians improves patient satisfaction. Journal of general internal
medicine, 31(7), pp.755-761.
• Goldstein, P., Shamay-Tsoory, S.G., Yellinek, S. and Weissman-Fogel, I., 2016. Empathy predicts an
experimental pain reduction during touch. The Journal of Pain, 17(10), pp.1049-1057.
• Schaafsma, S.M., Pfaff, D.W., Spunt, R.P. and Adolphs, R., 2015. Deconstructing and reconstructing theory of
mind. Trends in cognitive sciences, 19(2), pp.65-72.
• Mitchell, R.L. and Phillips, L.H., 2015. The overlapping relationship between emotion perception and theory
of mind. Neuropsychologia, 70, pp.1-10.
• Fink, E., Begeer, S., Peterson, C.C., Slaughter, V. and de Rosnay, M., 2015. Friendlessness and theory of mind:
A prospective longitudinal study. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 33(1), pp.1-17.

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