Examining the Examiners: How Medical Death Investigators Describe Suicidal, Homicidal, and Accidental Death

This study describes differences in medicolegal death investigators' written descriptions for people who died by homicide, suicide, or accident. We evaluated 17 years of death descriptions from a midsized metropolitan midwestern county in the United States to assess how death investigators psychologically respond to different manners of death (N = 10,408 cases). Automated text analyses suggest investigators describe accidental deaths with more immediacy relative to homicides, while they also described suicidal deaths in less emotional terms than homicides as well. These data suggest medicolegal death investigators have different psychological reactions to circumstances and manners of death as indicated by their professional writing. Future research may surface context-specific psychological reactions to vicarious trauma that could inform the design or personalization of workplace-coping interventions.