Secondary Traumatic Stress (or: On the Dispersal of Brain Matter in a Kentucky Trailer)
When a man’s head has been blown off with a shotgun, you’d expect there to be more of a mess. But a 12-gauge to the temple, at close range, can be surgically precise. I was a third-year law student, still in my 20s, when I learned that. Our clinic director gave us a foot-thick, plain-brown expandable file and told us to “turn over every page.” The photo of the victim was stuck in an unmarked manila folder, shuffled into a stack of ordinary-looking paper. At first it looked like an error in printing; like someone had taken a picture of a shirtless man, sitting upright in a wheelchair, but somehow cropped out the top half of his head. Even the bottom of his face, the nostrils, the graying mustache, the mouth still open in surprise, was intact beneath a sharply defined line that divided what was left of his skull from the rest of his trailer.
An image like that is not immediately shocking. You may have made an educated guess that what you’re looking at is horrific, but you don’t know why. By the time you comprehend it, you’re already immersed in it. You can’t pretend you didn’t see it. Nor do you have the luxury of flipping to the next page or slapping the file shut; you must carefully examine every detail of the scene for your client’s sake. When you do, you begin to understand why there is so…
