Empathy

After reading both “Devil’s Bait” and “Empathy is Overrated,” I am less convinced of empathy than I was before. Jamison’s essay introduces a series of people who have all had similar experiences, whether their disease is real or simply a shared delusion. It is in the fact that they have all had similar experiences that they are able to support and believe each other. On page 229, one of the women afflicted with Morgellons, a woman named Kendra, says, “If it weren’t happening to me… if I was just hearing this from some regular person, I would probably think they were crazy” (Jamison 229); this quote shows that it can be hard to understand others if you are not able to share or imagine a persons feelings or experience. In this sense, empathy seems like an isolating concept. The doctors were not able to believe their patients because they cannot see of feel what is happening to them. Yet the ability to emphasize is also what allows these people a community to fins support in. Is it really possible that all of these people are experiencing a shared delusion? Is it just paranoid people being drawn into a sort of mob mentality around the disease? In any case, it seems like the idea of empathy is both harming and helping these people.

In the Price essay, I came to the conclusion that the author was arguing that to be empathetic is to be passive. Price found a persons empathy unproductive when it came to actually finding solutions to the problems at hand. Not only that, but empathy can be misleading as it is impossible to assume exactly what a person is feeling. It is obvious why people fall back on empathy; they want to feel helpful and understand, which leads to assumptions that dont get corrected because people dont always want to say what they’re feeling. To me, it seems like the main issue is a lack of communication between parties, and a selfish desire to understand. Jamison almost argues the opposite. In Jamison’s essay, the patients’ empathy to each other causes them to move into action, getting together and trying to prove themselves right so they can figure out a solution.

Both authors give the benefits and downfalls of empathy. Jamison’s personal story about how she herself succumbed to paranoia after her botfly incident was an effective tool to instill doubt in the reader around Morgellons, after writing her essay in a scientific argument format. I think both authors do a good job in not just giving exactly what they think, but writing in a way that leaves the reader thinking and doubting.