How do you become insensitive to seeing dead bodies?

Question

like cops, or emts jobs?

Answer 1

When you have a sense of duty, you don't dwell on the emotional parts of it.  Sure seeing death is hard, but you realize that your job is to determine how they died, or help them back to life, or investigate and search for clues.  You help their families find closure by doing that, so that is how you deal then.  Later, you talk about it to others.  Sometimes cops joke about death.  Its stuff you wouldn't want to be quoted in the papers saying, but its a coping method to those who understand how you feel.

Answer 2

You never really get used to it...you just learn to Cope over years of exposure to it. You have to in order to be an effective professional

Answer 3

You get to recognise them as objects not bodies. You have to be able to do this in order to effectively perform your job at it's best. If not something could be lost that may make or break a case when foul play is suspected or simply proving what has happened to an individual. So it or they have to be treated as other than human for those purposes. There are cases though when this cannot happen. Such as when a child is involved..

Answer 4

if you're sensitive, you souldent join.

Answer 5

well im not a cop or EMT but I spent 13 months in Iraq....it never gets "normal"...and it/they are something you can never forget.

Answer 6

It's not a matter of becoming "insensitive", it's about coping with the feelings better. I'm studying to be a nurse, and I don't think mucus will ever NOT make me queasy...but I'm doing my best to just focus on the fact that mucus is a part of my job.

I think that for most people, the sense of duty and pride they get from helping out society outweighs the fact that you have to see very gruesome things.

Answer 7

I never became insensitive...you just can't let it get to you or you'll lose your mind.   You just have to move on.

Answer 8

Go to work at a mortuary.

Answer 9

On my first autopsy, I walked in and just started dissecting: T incision, then later, cutting out the ribs, opening the bowel, and finally dissecting out the renal block. I had never seen a dead person before. There was no uncomfortable feeling, only respect. I think society ingrains us with this misconception that dead bodies are horrible. But remember that the body was once a LIVING person, and should be treated with the same respect as such. There is nothing horrible or gross about it. Some people say there is an inherent "reflex" if you will that makes us uncomfortable, but it's really psychological. If you believe there is such a reflex, you'll be uncomfortable. If you don't, it won't be so out of the ordinary to see an expired patient. Put aside those societal conventions and you'll realize it's not really a desensitization. Society encourages people to become sensitized (think of it like an allergy). Thus, avoiding the effects of sensitization will make working around dead individuals easier.

Answer 10

I doubt they become insensitive.  They may find ways to cope with it, but you don't forget seeing those things.

Answer 11

As a cop I never became insensitive, guess I should not have been on the job for 29 years, 11 of which as a homicide detective according to one of the answers.

You need to remember what the victim looked like and what was done to them, after all you are the one that speaks for those dead, you are the one that works the hardest for their justice.

It is not the bodies that got to me, it was the conditions of their death, it was what man could do to man and what was to become of the survivors.

Guess I'm a wuss, they all effected and affected me, especially the children. You just work, hard, around it.

Answer 12

by seeing dead bodies often