Doctors call it “compassion fatigue”.
It can be the inevitable cost of devoting a career to caring for patients, of tending to their pain – physical and emotional – of trying to relieve suffering.
After some time, the potent impulse to help subsides. Empathy wanes, too, replaced by a measure of powerlessness, a numbness, a detachment, and a divide between healer and patient.
It has not taken years, but only 100 days for compassion fatigue to begin, I sense, to creep into how people outside Ukraine feel about what is still happening to people inside Ukraine.
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