The Cost of Helping or of Not Helping

The Cost of Helping or of Not Helping Clearly, helping has its rewards, but it has its costs as well. The firefighters in Ladder Company 6 who somehow survived the collapse of the North Tower of the World Trade Center while saving Josephine Harris were among the lucky ones. Many people were killed while helping others that day, such as Abraham Zelmanowitz, a computer programmer who refused to leave his quadriplegic friend who could not descend the stairs. And beyond 9/11, we often are moved by stories of the costs paid by those who offer help, such as Donald Liu, who in August 2012 saw two boys swept up by riptides in Lake Michigan and swam in to save them despite the protests from his own children about the dangerous conditions. The boys were saved, but the 50-year-old chief of pediatric surgery at the University of Chicago and father of three young children did not survive.

Other helpers have done more sustained and deliberate helping, such as the people who helped hide runaway slaves in the nineteenth-century United States or the people who helped hide Jews during the Holocaust. Sharon Shepela and others (1999) call this type of thoughtful helping in the face of potentially enormous costs courageous resistance. And although giving help is often associated with positive affect and health, when the help involves constant and exhausting demands, which is often the case when taking long-term care of a very ill person, the effects on helpers’ physical and mental health—as well as on their financial security—can be quite negative.