Turning Away from Suffering

For a large part of my working life, from 2002 to 2023, I was involved in health work in Thailand, much of it among Shan communities along the border between Thailand and Myanmar. It is a region where conflict and displacement have shaped people’s lives for generations. Some families have known nothing else. And yet, for much of the world, it has rarely been more than an occasional headline.

This book grew out of that gap: between suffering that is real and constant for the people living it, and the brief, uneven attention it receives from everyone else. I do not think the people who look away are usually cruel. Most of us, at one time or another, have closed a news report, scrolled past an appeal, or changed the subject when someone else’s pain came too close.

This book asks why. In particular, it asks a question that ties together the three books in this series: do we sometimes turn away from other people’s suffering because it brings us too close to our own fears, about ourselves, about the people we love, and about our own mortality?

The honest answer turned out to be “sometimes, perhaps, but not always, and not only.” People turn away for many reasons: because they feel helpless, because they do not trust what they are told, because they are exhausted, because they have other people depending on them, or because knowing more would make an uncomfortable choice harder to avoid. Some of those reasons are good ones. Some are not. And whatever the reason, the people who are suffering do not stop needing what they need.

This book also looks at two places in some detail: Gaza, and the Karen communities of southeast Myanmar. My own work was with Shan communities, not Karen ones, and I have not tried to write about the Karen from personal experience. I chose these two cases because there are careful published accounts of them, written in large part by the people and organizations involved, and because they are not interchangeable symbols of tragedy. Each shows something easily missed from a distance. People living through crises are rarely waiting passively for outsiders to notice them. They are organizing, caring for one another, raising children, keeping schools and clinics going, and making their own judgments about what they need. Any response from outside has to begin by taking that seriously.

This academic edition sets out the research and sources in detail so that readers can weigh them. I distinguish possible explanations for withdrawal from evidence that could establish their importance, and both from the ethical question of what we owe. I hope that keeping those questions separate makes the conversation more useful.

The illustrative situations in these pages are ways of thinking through a question, not disguised accounts of individual patients or families. Where the book discusses real places and organisations, its claims depend on the dated sources identified in the text.

I do not offer a checklist for caring about the world. What I hope to offer is a way of thinking that lets us be limited without pretending we owe nothing, serious without being permanently distressed, and able to enjoy our own lives without needing to forget anyone else’s.

Stuart Corlett

Carterton, New Zealand

2026