10/11/2025
It’s taken me some time to wrap my mind around what’s been happening in our culture lately. And as a mental health provider and director of a non-profit that exists to help people heal from trauma — and as a human being — I feel the need to (finally) respond.
As a mental health provider, I am trained to watch for hints of death. We call it “suicidal ideation” and “homicidal ideation.” Historically, I’ve known what to watch for — the words, the tone, the plans and methods, the quiet despair, or the calculated rage that signal danger.
What I’m now struggling with is something far more subtle and disturbing - an unsettling precursor I was never trained to name: the casual celebration of death. The laughter. The mockery. How did we become a society where we can witness brutality and respond with entertainment, memes, or applause?
And all while knowing, ironically so, that death itself reminds us of the one truth that binds us all: we are all temporary. Fragile. Flesh and breath. And one day, we too will return to the dust from which we came.
From a broad view, moments like this reveal how divided and reactive we’ve become — how quickly we can lose sight of compassion in favor of outrage. And from a personal view, they invite us to pause, to reflect, to ask what kind of world we’re shaping when we turn loss into spectacle.
I’ve also been trained to take a neutral professional stance — to leave my value system at the door. But how can I disown my own humanity? How can I come into compassionate agreement with someone who would joyfully dance on the grave of a murdered husband, father, or son?
At what point do my educational degrees and professional license become a burden — asking me to silence the very part of me that knows the sacred from the profane? There are moments when neutrality itself becomes a form of complicity. When detachment masquerades as professionalism, and silence feels like betrayal.
While the human in me struggles with this, the therapist in me knows that those who seem to “love death” are rarely at peace with life. (Yes, there are some absolutes in mental health; that’s how we get diagnostic criteria and effective therapeutic interventions.)
Their laughter isn’t strength — it’s detachment. It’s a hardening. A cry for help. When a heart becomes indifferent to — or joyful in — another’s suffering, it’s often because pain, trauma, or fear have numbed the capacity to feel.
Research calls this “moral disengagement” and “identification with the aggressor” — a psychological protective shield that makes cruelty seem justified and compassion feel unsafe. But underneath that armor lives a deep, unhealed wound. Because no one who is fully alive, healed, grounded in compassion, and connected to their own life’s purpose could ever find joy in another person’s end.
So where do we go from here?
Maybe it starts with remembering that we’re all capable of drifting too far from our own hearts. That in a noisy, divided world, it’s easy to mistake mockery for strength or laughter for power. But neither brings peace. Neither heals what’s broken.
We don’t have to keep hardening. We can choose to soften — to pause before we speak, to let silence remind us that life and death are not jokes to be mined for comfort, clicks, or validation.
Reverence doesn’t require agreement; it requires awareness.
And if we find that something inside us feels numb or satisfied by another’s suffering, that’s not shame’s cue — it’s grief’s invitation. Because hurt people hurt people, and healing begins the moment we stop pretending we’re untouched.
It may not be our fault that we were wounded, misled, or desensitized. But it is our responsibility to heal — to reclaim what’s tender and human in us. Because the moment we stop laughing at death and start listening to what it teaches, something begins to come alive in us again.
Thanks for reading,
Melinda
(Writing here not as a spokesperson for FCCS, but simply from one human heart to another.)
