Are We too Busy to be Kind?
Linda Lipshutz
Emily Minor, a columnist for the Palm Beach Post News in Florida, broke down crying in her doctor’s office because she was missing her previous doctor who had died from leukemia. Nobody bothered to comfort Minor, much less look her in the eye.
What gives? Are we losing our kindess?
National Association of Social Workers member Linda Lipshutz, MSW, LCSW, ACSW, answered that question in Minor’s newspaper column. People are kind but are so stressed they have no empathy left to give others.
“A lot of people are at the end of their rope,” she says. “They have financial and family worries. They have insecurity about whether they have jobs.
Social workers help people improve their connections to others. To learn more visit NASW’s “Help Starts Here” Relationships Website by clicking here.
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I am a RN and a social worker…I have worked in healthcare for over 35 years. Last week I was hospitalized for a cardiac ablation and had a life threatening complication which landed me in the cardiovascular surgery intensive care unit.
During the past couple of months I have been under a lot of my own stress and while in the ICU I had very little in me that could relate to the suffering of the patients around me who were probably sicker than I was.
This is my first experience feeling this way…usually when I am in the hospital I am worried more about my room-mate than myself…this time I found myself more annoyed with the noise and fact that my neighbor was watching RoadRunner. While in the ICU the last thing I wanted to hear was anyone laughing or watching television.
I was surprised at myself and my reaction but my well-being was threatened and I guess when that happens you just don’t have anything left in the empathy department to give to anyone else.
I can definitely relate to this discussion.
Those of us in healthcare need to care of our selves so that we can continue to be empathic to those that we serve…what we are experiencing sometimes is compassion fatigue but it is related to ourselves.
I believe with all my heart that people today are only concerned with themselves and their lives. There is no “help your neighbor” anymore or common courtesy. I don’t mean to sound jaded but my life experiences so far have led me to think in this way. There is very little empathy out there, and I guess as a social worker this disturbs me a great deal. I know how I have been treated in the past and I would never do this to anyone else.