The Cure That Is Neglected 

By Jon Nelson and Lucy Nelson

Compassion is simple in concept. Almost embarrassingly simple. It’s the ability to feel what someone else is feeling, to sit in their discomfort for a second instead of walking past it. 

That’s it. 

No degree required. No clinical trial. No FDA approval. Just the willingness to say: “I see you, and what you’re carrying is real. How can I help?”

So why is it the thing we as a society are worst at?

Go back far enough and compassion shows up everywhere humans do. It’s in the earliest tribal codes, the earliest religious texts, the earliest reasons strangers helped strangers survive a winter. It’s not a modern invention. 

What’s modern is how good we’ve gotten at avoiding it.

Look at mental illness; epilepsy, depression, anxiety, addiction, every condition that lives partly in the brain and gets treated like a character flaw. People don’t hide because the disease is shameful. They hide because we’ve taught them, generation after generation, that the world has no room for it. So they go quiet, they go anonymous. They build entire communities online just so they can say the true thing once, safely, without a name attached.

Think about that for a second. Millions of people, carrying real pain, real fear, real questions about their own bodies and minds, and the only place they feel safe enough to say it out loud is a screen name in a subreddit at 2am.

This is absurd. 

The only place to feel like you have a voice is when nobody knows who you are.  

That’s not a mental health problem, it’s a lack of compassion. It’s costing us lives and needless suffering.

Here’s what happens when you take those anonymous, scattered, silenced voices and give them permission to be loud: they stop being a burden and start being a movement. Many major shifts in how we treat illness, disability, addiction, trauma, it didn’t start with a breakthrough drug. It started with people who were done hiding, standing next to each other, saying the same true thing at the same time. Compassion is what lets them stand next to each other in the first place. Somebody showed up first. Somebody said “me too” before it was safe to say it.

You don’t need a title or a platform to do this. You need to notice someone struggling and not look away. You need to ask the follow-up question instead of the polite one. You need to let someone’s diagnosis, someone’s bad day, someone’s brain doing something scary, lead to a supportive conversation instead of staying a secret.

During my decade-long battle through hell with treatment-resistant-depression, the primary consistency I had through the process was being spit on by society. BUT, there were moments of relief. The drugs didn’t help. The standard medical interventions didn’t help but people seeing me and my pain and proactively doing something with that was beyond therapeutic. 

While empathy is the feeling or understanding of someone’s experience, compassion sparks the decision to respond. Compassion was the only medicine that consistently helped when I wanted to die every day from my brain disease.  

A nurse sitting with me while I was receiving transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and simply placing her hand on my forearm during the procedure. She said nothing. She simply let me know she was there with me. She saw me and she wanted to know she cared. 

I could barely brush my teeth but at the same time I needed to provide for my family. It was nearly impossible but I had no choice. Every piece of my being and energy was focused on making it through the day to get back to bed. I came home one day and my neighbor had mowed my lawn. I will never forget it to this day. It still makes me feel loved. 

One of the most meaningful mechanisms for human connection is Notice. Talk. Act. Human connection can be life saving for people suffering with mental illness. Make them be seen. Truly listen and be present and follow-through with an act of kindness.

Think about your favorite person. Think about their warmth and kindness. Using the compassion you receive from others, you can funnel that into Loving-Kindness Meditation. This practice is simple but effective. Embracing the love and kindness others provided to you and imagining others also receiving that warmth opens up a world of hope. This practice not only involves love for others, it promotes love for yourself by simply manifesting.

We don’t need another summit without action. 

We don’t need another playbook. 

We don’t need another campaign with a hashtag and no follow-through. 

We need people willing to be uncomfortable for thirty seconds so someone else doesn’t have to carry it alone.

That’s the whole ask. Show up. Feel something. Say it out loud. Offer to help.

It’s free. It’s available to every single one of us right now. And, in my opinion it’s the most underused lifesaving tool we have.