Empathy Lessons

Recent Posts - page 2

• Online therapy now. Now is the time.

  By Lou Agosta on March 13, 2020

  

  If ever there was a time for online (tele/cyber) talk therapy, this is it. In case you were trekking through Tibet or living in a cave with Buddhist monks, allow me to clarify why. Key term: social distancing. It is… Read More ›

• Review: Psychiatry Under the Influence by Whitaker and Cosgrove – Follow the Money

  By Lou Agosta on March 3, 2020 • ( 1 )

  

    Book Review: Robert Whitaker and Lisa Cosgrove. (2015). Psychiatry Under the Influence: Institutional Corruption, Social Injury, and Prescriptions for Reform. New York and the UK: Palgrave Macmillan. 241 pp. [$33.81 – less if digital] This is an important book… Read More ›

• Noted in Passing: George Steiner, author, After Babel, on translation, the Bible story, and empathy

  By Lou Agosta on February 9, 2020

  

  George Steiner passed away in the fullness of time at his home in Cambridge, England, at the age of 90. This blog post acknowledges and honors him for his contribution, largely previously unnoted, to the understanding and practice of empathy…. Read More ›

• Empathy, Capitalist Tool

  By Lou Agosta on February 5, 2020

  

  Business leaders lose contact with what clients and consumers are experiencing. Leaders get entangled in solving legal issues, reacting to the competition, or implementing the technologies required to sustain operations, and lose touch with the empathic core of business. Yet empathy is never needed more than when it seems there is no time for it.

• Noted in passing: Elizabeth Wurtzel, author, Prozac Nation

  By Lou Agosta on January 23, 2020

  

  Elizabeth Wurtzel (1967–2020) died at the age of 52 on January 7th in New York City of metastatic breast cancer. Wurtzel became a notorious “bad girl,” with a wicked sense of black humor, sparing few, least of all herself, and… Read More ›

• Review: The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays by Esmé Weijun Wang

  By Lou Agosta on January 12, 2020

  

  Esmé Weijung Wang’s The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays (Gray Wolf Press, 2019: 210 pp.) are an articulate and clarion cry to bring empathy to an arena in mental health where it has been missing. My take on it? Ms Wang seems… Read More ›

• Top 10 Empathy Trends for 2020

  By Lou Agosta on January 3, 2020

  

  10. Empathy is the new love. You know how in fashion gray is the new black? Same idea. Empathy is the new love. What people really want is to be “gotten” for who they authentically are as a possibility. In… Read More ›

• Top ten empathy gifts for the holidays

  By Lou Agosta on December 23, 2019

  

  How is Christmas like a day at the job? Give up? You get to do all the work; and the big guy in the suit gets all the credit. Pause for laugh. [Note: if I have to explain the joke, it is… Read More ›

• Empathy tip: Empathy is a dial, not an on-off switch

  By Lou Agosta on December 10, 2019

  

  People treat empathy as if it were an “on-off” switch. Turn it “on” for friends and family; turn it “off” for the “bad guys”. Turn empathy “on” for coworkers, customers, and insiders; turn empathy “off” for competitors, for compliance, and… Read More ›

• Compassion fatigue: A radical proposal to overcome it

  By Lou Agosta on November 17, 2019

  

  One of the criticisms of empathy is that is leaves you vulnerable to compassion fatigue. The helping professions are notoriously exposed to burn out and empathic distress. Well-intentioned helpers end up as emotional basket cases. There is truth to it,… Read More ›

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