The Long-term Effects of Repeated Exposure to Death

For funeral directors, exposure to mortality, tragedy, and the human costs of each are daily realities. That the field requires particular personality traits goes without saying; those who choose this path comprise a specialized, self-selecting crew who willingly place themselves in emotionally exacting roles.

There are long term effects that go along with this field of work, lasting and sometimes permanent. Stresses specific to the logistics of death care may carry emotionally intense impact and leave behind biological effects on practitioners from simply being repeatedly exposed to the raw realities of death. 

Stressors

Constant exposure to the grief of others is one feature of the psychologically demanding landscape. Unanticipated tragedies, horrors, and mortal crimes (some among grimmest of possible human experiences) is another. The ubiquitous potential of such cases to pop up any random day is an additional intensifier. 

The psychological burdens of tending to the dead and the grieving are well documented in scientific literature — types of death matter, as do circumstances. Secondary traumatic stress is a real risk (PTSD is three times higher among funeral workers than in the rest of the population), and so is worsening death anxiety and burnout. 

Also, all temperaments and backgrounds play a big part in overall impact and personal reactions. As in any context, different people can respond dramatically differently to the same sorts of cases, and the number of personalizing factors affecting individuals is vast.

The more you know

One study showed results that may seem counter-intuitive: those with more death exposure, including the physical handling of remains, had greater psychological resilience than those with less such exposure, and the same was true of the effects of interaction with the bereaved. A sort of “adaptive habituation” may be at work here, with the work contributing over time to establishment of a supportive core capable of supplying professional identity and meaning.

There’s still a limit, though. COVID showed that when death volumes increased in an extreme way, burnout and secondary trauma risk was greater among funeral workers with more experience. That “protective buffer” seemed to have a threshold, or sort of saturation point, beyond which the effects of long experience reversed to become impossible to absorb.

A significant difference is that while death exposure fatigue it isn’t the same as bereavement, it all the same taxes the body’s stress system in similar ways. Witnessing suffering doesn’t take the same toll on the heart as grieving a loss of a beloved’s life, but it’s effectively a type of loss, and of grief, all the same.