How do you feel when you see a picture of (human) corpses?

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If one has such an instinct it's not dependent on whether you fear death (which I don't) any more than fear of spiders or snakes (also rooted in possible death) generally does.

If one has such an instinct it's not dependent on whether you fear death (which I don't) any more than fear of spiders or snakes (also rooted in possible death) generally does.

If it's news footage of violent death it leaves me with a jumbled mix of emotions: fear, awe, reverence, compassion, confusion, sadness and respect.

Non-violent death: fascination, sadness, respect

But when I come across an actual dead body I have no idea how I'll react. I suspect I'm more sensitive than most people who've answered in this thread. I see dead birds sometimes and I always freeze and stare feeling a blend of fascination, disgust, awe and also connectivity to all living beings. We all live, we all die, we all seek happiness and avoid suffering. So I'm grateful for encountering the dead birds. I feel compassion for them, but I'm grateful I saw them, because it enhances my awareness of mortality and helps me deal with life.

I feel very many things, all the time. The problem is I have difficulties separating and identifying them. I've understood that's typical of some aspies, and also related to alexithymia.

I worked as a CNA (certified nursing assistant) for many years and it was part of my job to clean up the bodies after people had died. I always hated the word "expired"....as if people are parking meters. I will say that the first time I watched one of my patients die I was kind of spellbound because when you die all your muscles release and you just dont look real anymore. I found it very interesting, its like one second you are animated and in the next you look like a wax figure. Death is sad as it is an ending especially when children and young people die. It does not freak me out though. I would be comfortable working in a morgue, the only thing that prevents me from doing that is that I cant stand the smell of decomposition. When I was in school for Medical Assisting we were taken to the morgue and they showed us a video of a guy who had gone through a thresher, I believe...some sort of farming equipment. Anyway, he looked like a pile of hamburger and then they showed us an after picture where they had managed to sew him together to make him somewhat resemble himself for the family. I thought that was pretty amazing. One of the guys who worked there told me that when he first started he had to put vics vapor rub in his nose until he got used to the smell. Who knows maybe Ill try for a job at the morgue when I move to France and my kids are older and I learn a bit of French....even though, hopefully, my patients wont be speaking to me ......sorry, I have a dark sense of humor!

I don't have a problem with it, but that doesn't mean I don't get creeped out by it. But I'm use to it, and besides more exposure means the fear is more tamed.

Having been a coffin carrier (don't know the correct term) for a few weeks I frequently wandered around the morgue, as much as allowed of course, and saw quite a few bodies in various levels of injury.

I didn't think I'd feel anything the first time I saw a corpse, but there was a morbid curiosity there. A sort of "poke it with a stick" urge welled up in me. But there was no revoltion of any kind and I watched Zombieland during my employment there without losing any sleep (though I became increasingly curious after).

I am not really bothered by this. I suppose I am desensitized (although, it does sadden me depending on the image). There is one particular image from the Bosnian war (1990's) that haunts me to this day, though.

Part of me feels intrigued and not disturbed at all.

I do not actually have the image (I saw it on television a few years ago).

I will describe it gently: A mass grave was being unearthed by a United Nations war crime team. One of the bodies, a woman about 40-years old, was removed partially intact (not fully skeletal). The striking, disturbing part of the image for me was that this woman still had a full head of yellow, stringy, bleached hair. It was wet and muddy. I will never forget that.

As a child, I used to be frightened, to the point of diagnosable phobia, of human corpses. Even the thought would send me into a literal panic.

I should thank my stepfathers for teaching me to live with fear, and teaching me that fearing something is a weakness. By the age of twelve, I was deliberately desensitizing myself, because I did not want to have such an easily exploitable weakness. I started out with words in the dictionary; it was years before I managed pictures. Eventually I got interested in Egyptian funerary customs, superstitions surrounding the dead, and oddly enough, zombies. This took me until about the age of twenty, at which point I would say I no longer had a diagnosable phobia.

By the age of twenty, I was able to safely work with the corpse of an animal in my biology class. At twenty-five, I started taking anatomy classes for my biomedical engineering degree; and I spent a lot of hours in the gross anatomy lab, looking at the cadavers to learn human anatomy.

My feelings currently are usually fascination with the intricacy of the human body, and the way all the systems work together, and how individual and unique every human being is. Looking at a textbook, with just diagrams, it all seems so neat and simple; but real human beings aren't like that. They're complicated; and everybody is just a little different.

I am usually aware that I am working with human cadavers. It's very obvious that they are not people; even when they are quite intact, my brain doesn't put them in the same category as "people", or for that matter even the same as the category I put people and animals into. But I do get rather melancholy about it; those bodies used to belong to people who used to be alive; and I feel really grateful that they decided to let us learn from their bodies. It's funny; even studying the reproductive system didn't feel like any sort of an "invasion of privacy"; but when we studied the brain, I felt very reverent; because that is what stored the information that made up that human being, and the brain is a great deal more personal than just reproductive organs.

I think maybe I can learn more easily from cadavers than my classmates can; because for them it is still "freaky", especially to see faces and hands. For me, it was never "freaky". It was either paralyzingly terrifying, because of the reality of death; or else it was fascinating because of the mystery and beauty of life.

It depends. If it's pictures of children, babies, animals killed in cruelty/ abuse it feel like a punch in the gut to me. Seeing those poor people in old photos from the death camps get to me too.

Yes, I do react differently to pictures of murder/genocide victims... I hadn't thought about that; I don't really put them in the same category. In fact, when I studied the Holocaust (I had been at that point trying to understand the problem of human evil), I don't think I put the photos of Holocaust victims in the same category as the photos of the Egyptian mummies and such that I had used to help with my phobic issues when I was a teen. Natural death is sad, and it's frightening. But the impressions I got, once the fear started to go away a little, were more of time passing and the generations changing and people learning and building a society in the hopes that they might pass on things that lasted after their own deaths.

With the Holocaust, though, there wasn't anything like that. I had more the impression of, "They can't do any more to them; that's a relief," and a horrible sadness and anger that human beings could ever do anything like that, and desperate to find out how I could make sure I myself never let anything like that happen. It was almost as though they were symbolic of all the human misery caused by human evil... I know, that sounds awfully melodramatic; but with corpses, you just don't see human beings like you do with living people. When I saw the photos of Jews wearing yellow stars in their ghettos, I only wished I could go back and help them; but when I saw the pictures of the dead bodies in the concentration camps, I didn't see people anymore; I only saw the evidence of how horribly evil human beings can be.

Nothing.