Suicidal empathy is a term Dr. Gad Saad uses to describe a specific failure mode of compassion: empathy that gets detached from boundaries, reciprocity, and cost-accounting—until it starts producing outcomes that harm the very people and institutions doing the empathizing.

Read it less as a diagnosis and more as a warning label. Empathy is normally a pro-social tool. It helps humans cooperate, care for dependents, and build trust. But like any tool, it can be misapplied. When empathy becomes an unconditional rule (“the compassionate option must always win”), it stops asking the questions that keep compassion functional: Who pays? Who benefits? What incentives are we creating? What happens if this scales?

That’s the central mechanism. Unbounded empathy deactivates trade-offs. It treats limits as moral failure, and it treats enforcement as cruelty. In public life, that often looks like policies designed around the needs of the claimant while steadily eroding the duties owed to the steward—the taxpayer, the law-abiding neighbor, the already-vulnerable person living downstream of disorder. It isn’t that compassion is wrong; it’s that compassion without accounting becomes a transfer of risk onto the conscientious.

If you want this concept to be useful—rather than partisan—you need a clean heuristic. Here’s one:

The Suicidal Empathy Test (a quick diagnostic)

When you see a “compassion-first” policy, norm, or movement, ask:

  1. Where does the cost land?
    Is the cost paid by decision-makers, or exported onto people with less voice?

  2. What happens at scale?
    Would this still work if adopted widely, or is it only viable as a boutique exception?

  3. What incentives does it create?
    Does it reward responsibility and reciprocity—or does it reward manipulation, noncompliance, or repeat harm?

  4. Are boundaries being treated as immoral by definition?
    If the only “good” option is the one that refuses limits, you’re not doing ethics—you’re doing sentiment.

  5. Does it erode the conditions that make generosity possible?
    High-trust societies can afford softness because they still enforce norms. If the proposal weakens trust, safety, or shared obligation, it may be burning the fuel empathy runs on.

You don’t need cynicism to apply this test. You just need the willingness to treat compassion as something that must be paired with responsibility. The point isn’t to feel less—it’s to see more: the second-order effects, the incentives, the people who silently pay. If empathy can’t survive contact with those questions, it isn’t moral courage. It’s moral vanity with a body count.

References

Suicidal Empathy (publisher page – HarperCollins / Broadside Books)
https://www.harpercollins.com/products/suicidal-empathy-gad-saad

Gad Saad – Concordia University faculty profile
https://www.concordia.ca/faculty/gad-saad.html

The Parasitic Mind (publisher page – Simon & Schuster)
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Parasitic-Mind/Gad-Saad/9781621579939

Gad Saad – Psychology Today contributor page
https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/contributors/gad-saad-phd

Suicidal Empathy (Audible Canada listing – includes release date/details)
https://www.audible.ca/pd/Suicidal-Empathy-Audiobook/B0FZ6JMVFQ