ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on fairly obvious mental health symptoms, which can be thought of as the outer layer of the onion. Their main influence on empathy is to increase self-preoccupation, and even though not all of suffer from serious mental illnesses, everyone experience emotional distress to a degree. In pre-industrial societies, mental health and mental illness were seen largely as spiritual phenomena. Psychosis, for example, might be attributed to possession by a malevolent spirit. With the advent of modern medicine, medical explanations were developed for mental illness. Medical explanations often emphasized eradicating diseases in order to restore the individual to health. An inflamed appendix could be surgically removed; antibiotics could eliminate disease-causing bacteria from the body. The number of mental health challenges people can face is vast, and some people simply defy categorization by any diagnostic system. The chapter recognizes that some challenges affect more than one aspect of empathy, and some empathetic difficulties cross diagnostic categories.
