It’s easy to turn away from another news article or social media post about war and violence. After all, we’re constantly bombarded with images of traumatic events when we’re online.
The phenomenon, known as compassion fatigue, or empathy burnout, causes us to lose our capacity to react and help those in need.
“I felt this after the invasion of Ukraine,” said Jessica Roberts, an assistant professor of communication studies at the Universidade Catolica Portuguesa in Lisbon. “When I first heard about the atrocities it was horrifying, but then I heard about another town and my reaction was less extreme.”
Compassion fatigue does not have to be permanent. As Susan Sontag wrote in her 2003 essay “Regarding the Pain of Others”: “Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.”
So just how can we translate compassion into action? Here we take a…
