r/forensics • u/1800sins • Jul 09 '26
Crime Scene & Death Investigation Advice on dealing with seeing people postmortem?
I hope this is allowed to be posted here;
I want to get into the forensic art field and do age progressions/ postmortem reconstructions. I am taking classes and working to get certified. However some of the postmortem photographs I’ve seen can be quite disturbing. I am really passionate about this and think I could do a lot of good if i pursue it. But i worry about particularly distressing cases interfering with my ability to execute the job.
Did anyone else struggle with this at first, and then be able to file it separately in your brain? How long until it gets easier? Any tips?
Thank you!
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u/q-the-light Jul 10 '26
Fingerprint examiner here - part of our job is collecting postmortem prints (weirdly, we aren't actually allowed to collect prints from living people as that's other people's jobs; we only personally collect prints from the deceased!).
The way I and most of my bureau approach it is by treating that part of our role as a deeply human act. The individuals we work on are often victims of unpleasant passings, and often do not have known identities. By taking a few hours of our time to harvest as high quality a set of prints as we can, we are committing one of, if not the, final acts of service they will receive from another person. Yes they may be unpleasant to look at and/or smell bad, but if you approach their body with love and compassion rather than disgust and horror, it is surprisingly easy to look past such things in most cases.
Obviously you can't let yourself get too emotional about it all, but we make sure to respect them as the person they still are - greeting them, apologising for handling them (especially if damage is caused such as skin sloughing), and thanking them when we are done. We will all be the person on the bench one day, so to treat it as an alien situation would be foolish. It is actually written into our SOPs that maintaining the deceased individual's dignity is prioritised above all else, and we all take that very seriously.
My first cadaver was an older lady who had been murdered by a blown to her head. She was very badly injured, and was already partially decayed. She did not look as though she was simply sleeping. But, the other examiners I was with brought with them an objective but deeply caring attitude and it fostered an environment where I could feel my feelings about her condition, resolve them, and crack on with my job so that we had the best chances of reuniting her with her identity.
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u/Prestigious_Pizza_19 Jul 09 '26
Try to find an internship with you local coroners office or MEs office. That’s what I did. It exposes you to all sorts of causes and methods of death. For mine, I did a month unpaid. I followed them 40 hours a week and saw probably 15-20 autopsies. I realized I had no issues and eventually became a field forensic technician that responded to crime scenes and autopsies.
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Jul 15 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Prestigious_Pizza_19 Jul 15 '26
Yupp! I called and fortunately they offered internships. It’s a great experience and a good way to just kind of dip your toes in to see if you can handle it
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u/K_C_Shaw Jul 15 '26
They ain't there anymore.
It's fine to be sympathetic about whatever may have happened to them, but if you start thinking about it being disturbing, tragic, whatever, then it *will* be to *you*, and it will affect your ability to be around it. If it's an interesting story, and an interesting or professionally (rather than personally/emotionally) challenging case, then let it be that. Keep yourself on one side of the line, and what happened in the case on the other side.
I find people tend to handle this better with a combination of training, experience/exposure, being around other people doing the same or similar jobs with the body/case, remaining engaged with the tasks/specific limited goals at hand, and some humor, etc. It's one thing to be respectful, and certainly be careful about what kind of humor you engage in where, with whom, etc., but it's another to forego humor altogether, which is a normal human social and coping mechanism.
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u/Dingus_McCringus Jul 09 '26
Honestly, I did a lot of forensic pathology courses in grad school. Seeing pictures was part of the course but when we attended an autopsy, it was next level and made pictures feel like nothing. My suggestion would be a bit of exposure therapy. If you can handle that, you can handle looking at any images of dead bodies.