The ability to empathize and understand the perspective of the other seems to be altered in diseases such as the schizophrenia.
I believe a better definition is that they frequently wrongly interpret someone else behavior.
The recent study by Thirioux and colleagues suggests that the severity of the negative symptoms relates with disturbance of spontaneous empathic processing in patients with schizophrenia (see http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0278262614001031)
Theory of mind can be studied from 3 perspectives in psychiatric disorders. They are biological (neuropsyshological), psychodynamic and philosophical. As far as psychodynamic theories are concerned, they are of therapeutic value through insight orientation. Thus it is convenient to apply the psychodynamic theory of mind more comfortably in neurotic disorders. Insight facilitation through free association, transference and catharsis is easier in neurotic disorders than psychotic disorders due to the preserved psychological mindedness in neurosis. Thus in my understanding, it may be beneficial to educate the patients having depression or anxiety disorders with psychodynamic theory of mind.
Empathy have different components including cognitive, emotional, and motor. Cognitive aspect of empathy is characterised as TOM which is the ability to understand others' emotions. This component is required have empathy. Some people such individuals with autism have problems with TOM which leads to impairment in having empathy. People with schizophrenia also have some difficulty in TOM as well as in recognizing and producing emotions, so they have problems with empathy.
Theory of Mind, put simply, is the ability to attribute beliefs, feelings, desires and intentions to other to others and to oneself, and by implication to understand that others may hold beliefs, desires and intentions, or experience feelings, that are different from ones own.
Empathy, on the other hand, describes the power to understand and imaginatively enter other people's feelings.
They are different concepts.
Anyone with a significant Theory of Mind deficit will have difficulty with empathy. However, it is not difficult to see how a lack of empathy may arise when there is no deficit in Theory of Mind.
Empathic deficits occur across a wide variety of psychiatric disorders and often fluctuate in severity. Theory of Mind deficits are only really striking in people with autism and certain form of brain injury where they tend to be static. Much confusion would be avoided if people took care to distinguish between the two.
People with autism spectrum disorders score lower in empathy tests comparing to the general population. Such people have deficits in theory of mind.
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