Empathy Burnout

The phenomenon known as compassion fatigue, or empathy burnout, causes us to lose our capacity to react and help those in need.

https://www.dw.com/en/war-in-ukraine-earthquakes-why-we-get-compassion-fatigue/a-64745432

“Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.”

“The underlying psychological mechanism behind compassion fatigue is desensitization.”

“It’s a kind of emotional or attentional filtering that protects us from suffering becoming too stressful or traumatic to cope with”

desensitization to violence and trauma can be an important adaptive strategy for people whose work involves frequent exposure to traumatic events, like soldiers, aid workers and doctors.

The problem arises when this desensitization is detected in the “ordinary” population.

“This adaptation is one of the mechanisms that actually drives further aggression and violence in society,” Bradshaw said, referring to research showing how conflict in Israel and Palestine escalates violence in children.

Yasmin Aldamen, at Ibn Haldun University in Istanbul, emphasized the dangers of how compassion fatigue can lead to greater violence and hate speech in society.

“We found that framing negative images and messages of refugees in the media opens the door for audiences to lose empathy for them or even have hatred for refugees,”