No matter one’s political views about the state of Israel, the atrocities of October 7th, the war against Hamas and its terrible impact on Gazans, we should all celebrate that the Israeli hostages were returned home this week. 🎉

Some of my colleagues and friends are calling it, rightly, a miracle.

In a world fractured by outrage, this moment cuts through divides and reminds us that life reclaimed from captivity is always worth honoring.

This week’s reunions — the final living hostages returning home after two years in Gaza — carry meaning far beyond geopolitics. They are a public reckoning with silence and the stigma of mental health. They remind us how the stories we tell, and those we hide, shape how we heal, grieve, and rebuild.

This week, I’m looking at four threads emerging from the news: visibility, advocacy, empathy, and grief — and what they can teach us about breaking stigma after collective trauma.

Visibility and Shared Stories Break Silence

When survivors are seen and heard, stigma loses its grip.

The first images of freed hostages arriving home: tearful embraces, trembling hands, and faces marked by time are more than news footage. They are mirrors of resilience. As one headline read, 'The hostages have names again.'

In Tel Aviv’s Hostages Square, families and strangers cried together, their private pain becoming public witness. Visibility breaks isolation. Every story challenges the silence that trauma demands.

From Survivor to Advocate

Survivors often carry a burden and a gift, which is the authority of experience.

Some freed hostages are already speaking about those still missing, turning survival into purpose. For many, this shift becomes part of healing, but also a new exposure.

To move from surviving to speaking takes courage and care. It is a journey of reclaiming voice and agency after being silenced. Advocacy is not the reward for surviving; it is the next act of survival.

Collective Empathy and Compassion as Mobilizer

Empathy is not the end of awareness. It is the beginning of action.

Crowds gathered across Israel all this week — cheering, weeping, holding photos of those still missing. Compassion in public form is visible hope. But sustaining it requires intention.

Empathy must become structure: trauma care, reintegration support, advocacy networks, and spaces for remembering. Compassion at scale is a choice. It is what turns emotion into movement and moments of relief into commitments of care.

Personal and Collective Grief

Every return home also marks an absence.

For each person reunited with family, there are others who will never return. In the same breath as joy lives mourning — for the lost years, the lives taken, and the scars unseen. None of these people will ever be the same. But as we hear their stories about their mental health, stigma starts to die a little more.

A friend of mine said recently, “Grief is not weakness. It is the body’s protest against forgetting.”

When shared collectively, grief can become a force for good, softening hearts, fueling reform, and calling communities to remember together.

What You Can Do