Compassion, health and community in the public sphere

Abstract

This paper discusses the discourse of compassion in contemporary health literature, with an emphasis on texts on the place of compassion in health practices and texts on the public health approach called “compassionate communities”. The goal is to identify and characterize a politics of compassivity and suffering in these discourses. The texts are selected from searches in the Latin American and Caribbean Health Sciences Literature and PubMed databases and interpreted according to the questions proposed by the paper, that is, the relationship between compassion, health and the public sphere. In the first set of texts, I highlight ways of categorizing and measuring compassion in health care, and a particular form of compassionate therapeutics. In confluence with recent medicalization and professionalization trends, it is argued that compassion can be a new way of defining problems as pertaining to the domain of “health” and, therefore, of carving a space for healthcare expertise in the public sphere. Attempts are made to make compassion a measurable and intelligible index from a scientific point of view, especially according to the methodological standards of the health sciences. Thus, “therapeutics of compassion” is drawn up in which compassion seems to be the missing ingredient and the possible solution to a series of social problems other than illness. In the second set of texts, the articulation between compassion and community stands out, through which a policy of compassion centered on loss and death as universal experiences can be propagated. Here, the therapy of compassion is generalized and articulated with a constellation of ideas relating to the “community” as a level of healthcare intervention and socio-political organization. Finally, the ambiguities and issues of a possible politics of compassion and community are discussed.