The big idea: is compassion fatigue real?

Can we really maintain our levels of empathy in the face of an increasingly brutal news cycle?If you believe some commentators, we’re in the midst of a compassion crisis, with a particularly brutal daily news cycle taking its toll on our reserves of sympathy. The more suffering we see, the less we care, as we mentally switch off from others’ pain. The result may even be that we struggle to feel as much concern for people close at hand when they come to u