I was jolted awake from my math class nap when a horde of my classmates rose from their seats and left. Literally left the classroom. I stumbled out of class confused, so as soon as I saw one of my friends, I asked about what was going on. Turns out, it was a walkout in protest of the Florida mass shooting, the one that’d robbed 17 individuals of their lives...and wiping the drool off my chin, I said, “Just because of a school shooting?” That’s when I stopped, and thought about what I just said. “Just because” of a school shooting, as if I were simply brushing off a small nuisance. And that scared me. So, like a studious teenager, I did some research...after a quick nap.

I found this kind of mentality is what Robert J. Lifton of the American Psychological Association described as psychic numbing, or the “turning off” of a person’s emotions. Lifton discovered the first time a tragic event occurs, we are naturally concerned. However, the more it occurs, the less we care. Psychic numbing is causing us to forget about the pain of others, to increase the harms of that tragedy, and neglect the solutions. Today, we will examine the causes, effects, and solutions for what BBC calls “just another day of gun fire, panic, and fear.”

Psychic numbing has one main cause--overexposure to traumatic events.

As the number of tragic victims increases, our empathy and our willingness to help reliably decreases. For example, when there have been more mass shootings in a year than there are days of the week, people will start to expect it and become numb to it.

The best case study for this is the First Gulf War--the first war to ever be televised. According to the Encyclopedia of the New American Nation in 2018, everyone who can in the world watched the CNN footage of the Gulf War. Seeing live mass slaughters for the first time caused riots and protests to stop the war. However, two decades later, the U.S. is still involved in the Middle East, but now, people are oddly silent, with no one demanding change.

Modern technology allows us to witness these atrocities, but our minds can’t comprehend the mass amounts of lives lost. The more mass violence there is, the more we feel like we can’t get emotionally involved because it could be too unpleasant or overwhelming. We’d never before had the capability of seeing monstrosities from our couches, but now we do, and it’s causing serious negative effects--of both a loss of empathy and an increase in the severity of tragedies as copycats vie for glory.

Psychic numbing’s first effect is we will start to lose our empathy for others. Mother Teresa once said, “If I look at the tragedies of the masses, I will never act. If I look at one person’s story, I will.” In other words, it is easier to empathize with one person’s pain than a million people’s.

On November 7, 2015, The London School of Business found people have different levels of information retention based on how information is delivered to them. When they hear statistics alone, they retain only 5% to 10% of what they hear.

This study shows when we hear statistics about tragedies around the world, we can only take in a tiny amount. That tiny amount isn’t at all enough for us to empathize with their situations. We lose the ability to empathize with one particular issue and create solutions for it.

The second effect is an increase in tragedy severity. Once psychic numbing begins to affect someone’s mindset, tragedies will start to become a normal part of life.

According to analysis on October 27, 2017 of data collected by the Television News Archives, just two weeks after the Las Vegas mass shooting (the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history), it had disappeared from the news.

That quickly, we lose empathy and move on from the disaster that caused 58 deaths.

NBC News reports on November 7, 2017, that in conjunction with our ignorance, there has been a significant trend upwards in casualty counts from mass shootings. This cause-and-effect relationship of psychic numbing has been studied by psychologist Paul Slovic for decades, showing our empathy is only going to continue decreasing as tragedies occur.

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Aya was playing around with her dolls when a bomb was dropped on her home. Before Aya could call for her family, the roof fell on top of her. When they finally pulled her out of the rubble, Aya was unrecognizable. Hospital staff and volunteers tried to take care of her as she fought for her life.

This story was reported by ABC news on November 2, 2016. Upon hearing this story, people frantically liked, commented, and hashtagged to claim they had contributed to the cause. Surprisingly, it did nothing to end the devastating airstrikes. To this day, airstrikes in Syria still occur. In fact, according to CNN news on February 19, 2018, tragedies have increased in frequency and carelessness for innocents with the airstrike occuring in one of the "de-escalation zones” that were supposed to be safe.

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Keeping in mind its cause and how devastating its effects are, we need ways to take action. There are two solutions--infuse human rights reporting and open our doors for stories.

One possibility is to infuse human rights reporting with powerful, affective imagery such as that associated with Hurricane Katrina, the South Asian tsunami, and the earthquake in Haiti. This would require pressure on the media to report the slaughter of innocent people aggressively and vividly.

According to Genocide Scholars on April 20, 2010, Wikileaks posted a video of U.S. soldiers firing indiscriminately upon civilians in Iraq, creating a media and political uproar. Dozens of news reports had already reported on the problem of indiscriminate targeting, none of which garnered the same attention as the online video which painted this picture with real footage. Allowing viewers to recognize the severity of the issue will wake their hidden empathy and bring them out from their numbed state.

Another way to engage our experiential system would be to welcome people from abused populations into our communities and our homes to tell their stories. Jane Dutton, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan said on December 3, 2015, “Yet, sometimes just being with others’ pain– looking at, rather than looking away, can be helpful in and of itself.” As in some cases, detailed narratives and personal stories from individual victims should be emphasized more than abstract descriptions of the scale of abuses—that is, stories over statistics.

That’s because we humans need stories to connect with others on a personal level. And it is when we understand their pain and misery that we take action. Otherwise, their sufferings are too distant, too out-of-reach for us to comprehend. When we squeeze a little bit of time to listen to what a victim has been through, we can finally see our common humanity.

Today, we examined the causes, effects, and solutions for psychic numbing. We can all agree that we can’t let this apathy continue. We can’t keep watching people suffer through the cruelty of the world from the comfort of our phone screens. Perhaps the dangers will never reach us, but without a stop to psychic numbing, if it does, we can’t expect anyone to help.  Maybe things could’ve been different after that day at the high school in Florida. Maybe we could’ve done more than send our thoughts and prayers. Maybe we could’ve finally taken action to stopping these mass shootings, and so many other tragedies, from becoming a normality.