How do we, as a society, react to people in pain?

[otherlander]

It seems to be a common reaction for people to become angry when another person expresses pain with anything other than a calm voice. If one expresses pain instead through an action, or even if pain is expressed solely through words, but those words are too loud, too urgent, society seems to react with anger. This anger seems to translate into a message somewhat along the lines of, "How dare you act/speak outside of the norm?" This reaction indicates two obvious things that I can see:

1. As a society, we look more at surface-level behaviors than at what causes them. This can be seen most clearly within bureaucracies. (Employers reacting to employees, school systems reacting to "problem" students, hospitals/nursing homes reacting to patients, etc.) But it can also be seen at an individual level.

2. We are very easily shocked as a society. Shock suggests fear and morbid fascination. This suggests repression. Are we shocked at others expressing their emotions because we are taught to suppress our own?

This shock and resulting anger turns people into escalators of situations. Because we're all individuals, we all feel differently, and cannot necessarily feel in solidarity with another person's pain, joy, relief, or rage. But we can at least recognize that we, as individuals, have felt similar things at some point. From this, can't we react with understanding rather than shock at emotion expressed beyond normal levels? (And why do we have such narrow norms that must be acted within? Doesn't this just make situations more easily escalated? It seems very... Victorian.)

I first started thinking about this problem within the framework of mental illness. It seems to me that madness often becomes a sort of refuge because the professionals trying to make one well come across as being so cruel. (But that's another thread for another day. It extends beyond the reaction-to-pain issue and into coping vs. fighting back, the pathologization of activism, etc.) The more I thought about it, the more I realized that this didn't just apply to people with mental illnesses, but to all people who felt pain, in short, everyone. Everyone who has ever acted out of pain and received others' anger for it, anger that comes from shock, which comes from suppression. Everyone who has ever, therefore, suppressed their own emotions rather than risk being yelled at for expressing them. Everyone who has therefore become shock-able themselves, and ready to react with anger when another person acts out in pain. How do we change that? How do we create a less break-able world?