“Devil’s Bait” by Leslie Jamison brings up the topic of empathy and how it relates to mental illness, or just illness in general. This piece of writing covers the author’s experience at a conference for people with Morgellons disease. Morgellons is a disease where the person affected believes they have bugs crawling under their skin and fibers coming out of sores and blisters all over their body. Many doctors do not believe these people when they come in begging for help, and believe it is all caused by a delusion not a skin disease like the person believes. According to all the people at the conference it can be extremely isolating, and the conference provides them with a sense of community where they can be with people who truly understand what they are going through. She brings up the concept of there being a fine line between understanding and empathizing with someone and being just like everybody else, full of disbelief and doubt. This piece raises the question at issue, does our knowledge of someone having an illness, whether it be physical or mental, affect our ability to properly empathize with them? This is an important question to answer because it causes us to think about what brings us to feel empathy. Do we only feel empathy for people with an illness because we are aware they are affected by it? The case discussed in this text brings about this issue because it displays that people find it difficult to truly empathize with someone when we cannot directly relate to what they are going through, or just do not understand what is going through their minds that make them believe they have bugs crawling underneath their skin. This is the case with a lot of mental illnesses. For example, it may be hard for some people to understand and empathize with people who have anxiety because they can not imagine feeling the same way in certain situations. It is similar for serious physical illnesses, such as cancer. It may be extremely difficult for someone to understand the physical and emotional toll the illness has on a person unless they have directly gone through the same experience.

Works Cited

Jamison, Leslie. “Devil’s Bait.” The Empathy Exams, pp. 27–56.