Failure to thrive: Two instances of the costs of societal lack of empathy

• In Event: Harming instead of Helping: Institutional Betrayal, Trauma and Total Institutions

Abstract

The current work is an examination of untended trauma in both individual and collective instances. It will assert that the untended traumas are linkable to a dearth of empathy in Western culture of the 20th and early 21st centuries. It will examine two instances of catastrophic suffering (the life and death of Kurt Cobain and the marginalization of Charles S. Myers), and show how at several points choices were made not to take healing action to prevent the harm that arose.

Author

• Julia Rose Swirbalus, Bridgewater State University