Compassion or Oversensitivity?

The Sick Child
Edvard Munch (1863-1944)
Photo Credit: Tate [CC BY-NC-ND] 

... We have lost sight of the wisdom that a bit of suffering, stress and criticism is part of the human condition and doesn't require intervention by the police, the state or anything else beyond our own inner resilience...

A decade ago a psychologist called Nick Haslam noticed a curious shift in the meaning of words. Trauma, for example, was once applied to physical injury (like blunt force trauma), but usage gradually extended to encompass being belittled verbally, or merely hearing about the trauma suffered by others. Over time, an ever wider and milder range of experiences were coded as traumatic. The same was for bullying. Once used to denote a big kid hitting a little kid in the playground, its meaning was extended to verbal aggression in the workplace, and then minor interactions in which harm was not even perceived by the putative victim.

In a way, you might think, so what? Many words change their meaning over time. But Haslam found something telling: it was only words associated with distress and hardship that were expanding rapidly. As western societies became more prosperous, it seemed, our tolerance for ever more minimal types of suffering was lessening. As Haslam put it: "The expansion primarily reflects an ever-increasing sensitivity to harm, reflecting a more liberal moral agenda."...

Disability used to apply to people who use wheelchairs and those with severe mental impairment. But the psychiatric community, as immersed in the broader semantic culture as the rest of us, have presided over an ever-expanding concept of disability. There are not just more syndromes but ever-lower thresholds. In the latest diagnostic manual, grief was included in the list of mental disorders.

Again, this may seem compassionate but is it really? As welfare budgets have ballooned  to remediate these conditions, and psychiatrists have become more stretched, and those suffering the most extreme conditions struggle to get help, there's a case for saying it has paralysed western societies...

It's no coincidence that economic dynamism has waned in the West as sensitivity to harm has escalated. In Poland, Vietnam and other rapidly growing nations, people battle through the minor vicissitudes of life; we pathologise them.

The Agony in the Garden
William Blake (1757-1827)
Photo Credit: Tate [CC  BY-NC-ND]

What is perhaps most alarming is this semantic creep extends into almost every facet of life. The concept of a refugee has extended (via case law) to encompass ever greater numbers of the world's population, the concept of a human right has ballooned in ways that are difficult to adequately parody... Students used to say they felt "unsafe" when they found themselves too close to a precipice; now they say it when reading Shakespeare.

It's noteworthy that almost all the great moral traditions reserve a central place for suffering, not because they are sadomasochistic but because they perceive its essential place in the human condition. The concept of dukkha (hardship) is one of Buddhism's four noble truths, Christianity regards certain types of suffering as redemptive and many eastern religions see it as a route to purification. Stoicism frames virtue as how we respond to the suffering that is a normal part of life...

(Matthew Syed, The Sunday Times,2025)

Another word which has become ubiquitous is "stress." It has largely replaced "pressure."