“I don’t know if the bumper-sticker people actually care. What I know is that if you show most people an invisible wound, you’ll get invisible compassion. Wear earplugs all the time, and even your close friends will just blow it off. Go blind from an eye migraine for a few hours and see how much sympathy that gets. If people can’t see your injury, they can’t really see you. Empathy requires stimulus, and in the average person’s perspective, anybody can just ‘fake’ post-traumatic stress or a TBI. This, of course, presumes the average person is capable of empathy.” Bryan Box in TNR on soldiers who come home with invisible injuries, and more generally, on people in pain: The Lies We Tell About Soldiers’ Traumatic Brain Injuries.