If archivists' perspectives are allowed, yes I can say that some of the events I've encountered in my work have affected my mental health. I remember sitting in the basement of our archives breaking down into tears on multiple occasions, and many of the cases I saw still haunt me to this day. I'm mostly in management and policy now, but when I was younger I had to learn several coping strategies to deal with difficult subject matter. Taking frequent breaks, socializing with colleagues who had similar experiences, and making sure I was surrounded with beauty were all helpful to me. But on the other side of the coin, I wouldn't trade those experiences. Those awful stories have given me a deeper understanding of the world and humanity, its capacity for good and evil, and also a better understanding of what's going on in the world today. They radically changed me as a person, and for the better, I hope.

As a historian, I can recall two instances. One was from my mentor and dissertation advisor. The other was a personal experience.

My advisor and I were discussing a draft chapter of a book he was working on. I asked him about the oral histories he was using and the conversation turned to how he was doing. He regarded me in silence for a moment then said, ‘not great’. A lot of the oral histories he was reading were from indigenous Californians along with some written accounts of California settlers. Indigenous families would hide their children to keep them from being abducted and enslaved. Stories of women being dragged away to be sex slaves for settlers. One report in particular made him break down. An Indian agent reported that a California farmer had 10 indigenous children in his care. When asked why he had so many children with him; the agent was told that the farmer and a group of other settlers went to a nearby indigenous settlement, murdered the adults and divided up the children.

For myself, I completed my dissertation and I was left with questions. Questions about my great-great-grandmother and what happened to her. In the course of my research, I found out what happened to my great-great grandfather but his spouse disappears. In combing oral histories, I find references to both of them and even her name. I continue to follow the bread crumbs. I found out that both of them were together when the death march that was the Long Walk occurred. They both make it to Fort Wingate where she is separated from her husband and two children. She was sold as a slave. Undeterred, I continued to follow her trail where it ended in Utah. In combing the records of her ‘owners’, I find out that she and others were simply worked to death and put into a mass grave. Upon discovering my great-great grandmothers fate, I broke down in tears.

I stick mostly to teaching now. Occasionally, I still do research for articles in local publications. But now I do so carefully; wary of whatever I may find.

This question is one of the topics discussed in Episode 188 of the AskHistorians podcast.

In this Conference Special, Morgan (u/Aquatermain) speaks to Claire Aubin about her study of Holocaust perpetrators immigrating to the US, the emotional strain of studying a horrific period of history, and the work of the Emotionally Demanding Histories Group.

Some things did get to me. The past few years I've studied the FBI's counterintelligence programs against the New Left and Black Panther Party in the 1960s, and some things did make me emotional one way or another. It was frustrating just how casual the FBI communicated internally about potentially ruining people's lives. A famous example is a letter sent to Martin Luther King, pushing him to commit suicide. Nobody ever wondered whether that was ethically alright to do. I've also used other sources, focusing more on the victims of the FBI's actions. One was written by such person targeted by the FBI, and he wrote about how a friend of his committed suicide because of the pressure applied by the FBI. I myself was struggling with my mental health as well at the time. It was just frustrating how a government agancy pushed people over the edge like that, with no remorse. I often had to speak to friends about it, but also writing my thesis was therapeutic in a way. I can imagine researching victims of a genocide or something similar, focusing on the human suffering, can wear you down. It's easy when it's just numbers. It starts to hurt when you realise every number is a person, with a family, a life, aspirations and dreams.

I'm a medievalist specialising in european female elites from the early and high middle ages, so not directly dealing with genocides (actually, being the descendant of jewish holocaust survivors I actively decided against going into modern history because the stories I grew up with were enough for me).

What I've recently noticed though is how my material is affecting me during my pregnancy. Women losing children, losing husbands, having to give up children in hostage situations - before getting pregnant I was able to strictly treat it in a professional way and not take my work home (at least in a metaphorical sense because I have yet to meet a person who was able to treat their PhD like a strict 9-5 job, lol).

But since I'm pregnant, every day I spend with research like clockwork the night after I'll be having nightmares about losing my husband, losing my child, dying in childbirth. It definitely affects me more than I thought but as of now I'm chalking it up to the usual hormonal mess and hoping it goes away sometime soon.

Edit: fixed some missing letters

I study genocide from a historical and sociological/criminological perspective, with a particular focus on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust and I also study the criminal justice system, which is very depressing in its own right, and my research therein focuses on a particularly upsetting topic.

People sometimes ask me how I can study such upsetting things, and I often think of it like this- it takes all kinds, and I am grateful for the ones who can do the other difficult jobs. I think we all have some area in which we can kind of work past the mental anguish and do the job that needs doing.

I, for one, could never work in an animal shelter. I would quite certainly become very depressed and probably suicidal. However, some people are able to focus on the good, or able to live with the bad, or whatever it is, to get the job done, and I am so grateful for them. The same with people who care for the elderly, or impoverished children, etc.

I think there are just some people who find the work important enough that you are able to push down those feelings or suffer through them or compartmentalize well enough to do what you must.

For me, the greatest challenge I face is that I want to talk about it. I want to tell people about the scale and the atrocities and I want people to know, but other people don’t like to hear these things, so I have to carry it in silence. That is my greatest struggle. It gives me some appreciation for what survivors went through, and further reinforces my commitment to hearing their testimony and trying to understand what happened to them. If they were willing to share that, the least I can do is listen and try to understand.

I don't know if my answer will be allowed, but as a historian I can give you my personal perspective. I usually don't encounter such subjects, as I'm mostly focused in researching the History of Science, but sometimes.

Recently, I've spent like a month doing research regarding the genocide and persecution of muslim populations in Myanmar/Burma and China and it was a horrible experience. I cried many many times and reading the accounts of survivors (in Myanmar, especially) would often leave me in a depressive state.

I specifically remember this one time when I was reading an interview with a woman who had her whole family murdered in horrible ways, I started crying and my SO asked me what happened. I tried to give her some light political context, w/o going into any details, and remember looking up and seeing that she had started crying as well.

So yes, studying such subjects is horrible for your mental health.

I'd also like to add that this is not, in any way, exclusive to historians. When I was in college, I got a gig transcribing recordings for a research in Sociology about homicide trials of husbands that had killed their wives. I honestly spent most of the pay in alcohol trying to forget the shit I had transcribed.

This was almost 10 years ago, but I still remember a case of a woman who had left and was subsequently murdered by her crack-addicted husband and the defence attorney stated that

The Bible claims that the wise woman builds her home. She abandoned her husband! Even if we prove that he is guilty of this crime, whose fault it really was?!

This is slightly adjacent to your question, but I think still relevant. In the beginning of her book Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in 19th-Century America, Saidiya Hartman discusses her choice not to reproduce any of the expected "spectacles of violence." She argues that doing so is all too common, and putting suffering on casual display like that actually innures readers to violence as well as furthering the insult to her historical actors.

I don't know if I count as a historian, but I recently mentioned in another thread that I am not affected by my studies - which is the reason why I study what I study in the first place. For context, I study the Holocaust. For years I have been trying to find material that does make me feel emotion. The most I can wring out of myself is that reading about prewar Jewish life in Eastern Europe makes me sad because I myself am an Eastern European Jew and I think about how my ancestors lived in these vibrant communities and it must have been so cool to be surrounded by people like you every day. Reading about the actual killing, however, does not evoke any emotion in me. I presume that either it's a function of my skewed empathy (I'm on the autism spectrum and have been known to cry over broken things while staying emotionless at funerals of loved ones) or it's a defense mechanism. I consider this a stroke of good luck, because it means I can become a Holocaust historian and not worry about becoming ill from my research or finding primary sources psychologically difficult to get through.

Other topics do make me very upset, but with a caveat. For example, I find that articles or books about racism or transphobia or other forms of bigotry that do not affect me make me very sad for the rest of the day, but as soon as I'm explaining it to someone else that sadness goes away and I'm in enthusiastic-scholar mode ranting about how someone got murdered as if it happened in a parallel universe and not my city.

Yes, absolutely. When going through archives and reading certain books covering the Holocaust, especially given that I am Jewish. I delved deeply into experimentations, gas chambers, furnaces, etc.. Why the Nazi's only chose to tattoo Jews who went to Auschwitz. The Warsaw Ghetto uprising. The perspective of Jews who fought whether they were European or American, and what they witnessed and felt. I also delved deep into some of the most horrific battles. Stalingrad, Kursk, Iwo Jima, Peleliu, Okinawa, Leningrad, The Battle of Berlin. I had to take a break for a while due to increased anxiety, depression and nightmares every night. I had trouble with getting good rest. Some of the books that I have read, I had to constantly put down and take breaks for a few hours or a day.

I love history. I'll always study and research in the pursuit of knowledge, but that knowledge can come at a price, temporary or otherwise. Some descriptions and images are forever burned into my memory. I simply will never forget just how horrible humans can be to other humans.

I'm a research apprentice for one of my history professors who is studying trauma and ptsd through history. It's a very interesting project, but it can be tough. Last week she wanted me to find survivor stories from hurricane Katrina. It took me a few days because I needed to take breaks or I'd start crying.

Yes.

I got a bachelors in history, and I focused a lot on genocides and the Holocaust. It’s always been fascinating to me. Not the murders themselves, but how it happened. How did Hitler convince so many people to go from racist to downright mass murder? How did Stalin get his country so divided and into a constant state of basically telling on your neighbors. I’m using these two names because they’re so popular, not because of anything specific they did or didn’t do. Nanking was especially hard. In a way, as messed up as it sounds, it’s easier to read “6 million were killed, mainly by gas chambers in the camps of Auschwitz.” But then hearing about some of the specific atrocities of Nanking really threw me for a loop. There’s a difference between just pointing someone to the left or right and doing some of the things the Japanese soldiers did.

As difficult as it is, I feel like I have to though. History will repeat itself. People need to know what happened. How easily an uprising can occur and wipe out thousands, if not millions, of people.

I don’t practice history professionally anymore, and especially not that side. It has gotten to be too much. I was fully prepared to go head first into a career at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. After some personal trauma, I can no longer stomach the idea of it. I still read about different genocides and things that have happened and are believed to happen in the future, but not on the same scale.

I will always love history. I will probably always read accounts and watch movies, documentaries and anything about it. I will admit, I love historical fiction as well as real historical accounts. Sometimes the dramatization is just great for entertainment although I realize it’s not accurate.

Personally I've studied genocide and atrocity crimes from my freshman year of college. (I'm only just now starting graduate school) In my department, I could only think of one professor who had any known mental health issues, and those likely coincided with his service in the Russian Military, as he predominately worked as a liason with the Chechen insurgency.

Otherwise I had several professors that had exclusively studied genocide for most of their lives that at worst had a dark sense of humor. The best example I have is Dr. Thomas Pegalow Kaplan of Appalachian State University, who is globally recognized in his field, is one of the most well adjusted people I've ever met. When I came to him and told him that our curriculum was keeping me up at night, he explained that the last phase of genocide was denial. It helped me see that the work he did, and I am ending up doing, is actively fighting what happened then, by stopping the erasure of victims.

Meeting my first holocaust survivor also helped a lot.

I left my grad program because of being unable to handle knowing some darker sides of the human condition. There is still one part of an oral history i recorded that i struggle with even now decades later. Im glad for the experience because my current field (mental health) has a lot of secondary trauma that I can handle better now.

Just a note - Iris Chang’s mental health problems were not necessarily only a result of her research. She had a mental health breakdown in 2004 after a prolonged period of sleep deprivation, depression, and being prescribed powerful psychiatric medication. Her suicide note reflects delusions of persecution by the government/CIA and other signs of psychosis. She definitely was disturbed deeply and depressed by what she saw, according to those who knew her, but there also were likely other factors that led to her breakdown being so intense and ultimately fatal.

I'm an archaeologist; I work in some colonial contexts where a lot of terrible things happened, and have done burial recovery of people who suffered violent deaths. My experience is that a lot of archaeologists who do this kind of work develop a tendency for morbid humor as a coping mechanism, along the same lines as law enforcement and medical personnel. The work also seems to attract people who are predisposed to it, sort of like being a mortician; there are jokes about the kind of person that becomes a forensic archaeologist. I do know one person who did recovery of genocide victims in Guatemala and developed depression/PTSD as a result. There's also a lot of drinking in archaeology culture, possibly related.

As a couple of other posters have alluded to, part of my training was the idea that archaeology lets us tell part of the story of people who might otherwise remain silent and forgotten in the historical record. So there is a certain sense that we are, hopefully, doing something positive on behalf of these individuals.

I mean, we're only human, right? Even medical staff like paramedics and doctors, who are supposed to be professionally detached from their patients, are affected by their work. Historians aren't immune to work-related trauma. I study disability history, and suffice to say, without going into details, there's some pretty ugly parts of history there. And yeah, it affects me. What drives me to continue researching this area of history is that it's a subject that not often gets recognized, and as a disabled person myself, it is important to me that this subject gets the attention it deserves. That said, I have my moments where I need to step away for a day or two, and give myself a chance to decompress before getting back into it. If I didn't, I'm 100% sure I could not do this job justice.

I'm going to take a slightly different approach than everyone else to this question.

I study Roman history; I don't feel particularly traumatized by stuff that happened 2000 years ago. The most gruesome things are written for dramatic effect and almost certainly exaggerated, so I have a level of insulation from that.

But as a graduate student in a history department, I several times taught courses that deal with the Holocaust. I have had many students complain about being confronted with stuff like the film "Night and Fog" or a reading from "Sophie's Choice", arguing that exposing them to that level of cruelty isn't necessary, and isn't educational.

I am not Jewish myself, but I have relatives who survived Auschwitz. The unwillingness of my students to confront the worst humans are capable of because it makes them uncomfortable causes me to despair of the historian's project. And when I see people in my lifetime burning books and banning certain frames of thinking, there's nothing to do but grab the nearest bottle of whisky.

I don't think that's the kind of trauma you're asking about, but it certainly is trauma.

Not a professional historian, more like a very dedicated hobbyist, but I study various late Romantic and 20th-Century composers. My main focus is Shostakovich, but I've also read up quite a bit on others like Ravel and Mahler, and studying individual lives can sometimes mean getting an "up close" historical look at mass atrocities, especially when you focus on an individual who witnessed such atrocities (Shostakovich, for example, was personally impacted by the Great Purges and Siege of Leningrad). It's not quite the same as studying the massive amounts of destruction and loss of life as a whole, but I feel there's certainly a different sort of pain you get when you follow someone's life through such events and learn about all the ways they were changed. And when that person is an artist, the primary sources you end up studying often include very intimate, personal accounts of that trauma, which are often expressed on an extremely human level.

Atrocities aside, studying composers usually means you get a very profound look at human suffering regardless. Not in every case, but that usually seems to be what happens with the subjects I tend to look at the most. Ravel, for example, died in what I feel was one of the most horrifying ways imaginable- he suffered from some sort of mental aphasia (we're still not quite sure what the exact condition was), and slowly lost the ability to read, write, play music, and control certain motor or speech functions. This regression went on for five years straight, and the accounts you can read from his friends as they do their best to make his life, in the words of biographer Roger Nichols, "even remotely tolerable," are absolutely heartbreaking. And you can look at the letters of Ravel himself, and watch his handwriting get messier and messier, until it's replaced with typewritten text, and then nothing at all. And going back to Shostakovich for a second, while many people tend to focus on his part in the relationship between art and politics in the Stalin era (which by all means is very important), I keep coming back to his friendship with Ivan Sollertinsky and how close they were, only for Sollertinsky to unexpectedly die in 1944. The devastation you see from Shostakovich in letters, interviews, and his Piano Trio no. 2 (dedicated to Sollertinsky) is absolutely haunting, and shortly afterwards, in 1948, he'd face suffering and humiliation once again after the effects of the Zhdanov decree, this time without one of the few people in his life who he knew he could trust.

It's seriously a lot to deal with, which is why I can really only focus on a few composers. For one, there's so much to unpack when it comes to just one lifetime, but the way so many of these people not only witnessed trauma, but also expressed their responses to it artistically, takes a long time to process. You also get to learn all sorts of wonderful things when looking at individuals, but it hurts all the more when you read about them suffering, because you get to see how purely and violently human they were.

I was part of a team that worked on the settlement agreement for Indian Residential Schools in Canada-- trying to arrive at settlements and personal apologies for individual surivors of abuse.

It wasn't really academic work like you would do at a university, but one part of our team was a group of historical researchers, all trained as historians, whose job was to check details of claims against surviving records to validate them.

Eight hours a day of reading detailed personal accounts of physical, sexual and emotional abuse of children put us all at risk for what is called Vicarious Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I was good for about two years before I started getting nightmares and intrusive thoughts.

I studied public and oral history, and one book that always comes to mind is Listening on the Edge: Oral History in the Aftermath of Crisis edited by Stephen Sloan and Mark Cave.

It is a collection of oral history projects where the oral historian details or provides excerpts of the oral history itself. The oral histories are with people that survived traumatic events, and then it provides a section of the toll it took on the oral historian. It's fascinating, and of course, heartbreaking. It covers projects on the Rwandan genocide, the Yugoslavia conflict (I can't remember the "official" name of the genocide), Katrina hurricane (this one piqued my interest in the hurricane and I had no idea of the actual extent and impact of the devastation of the hurricane before reading this), Narco violence in Juarez, and the Virginia Tech shooting among others. I reccomend it, especially as it deals a lot with recent history.

My Master's work dealt with Jewish Resistance Movements during the Holocaust and there were moments that just mess you up inside. Reading about a child who survived a mass shooting, starvation in the ghettos, and you're rooting for them to survive and then you find out that they died at Sobibor or some other camp just hurts. Reading about uprisings at Sobibor, Treblinka, Auschwitz, Warsaw, etc. are also somehow both uplifting and terribly depressing. They're fighting back (and expressing their humanity) in the face of horrific brutality, which is uplifting in a way, but it's also because they've finally accepted that violent resistance offers a better chance of survival than "peaceful" acceptance which is horrifically depressing. My PhD has moved on to a different topic but I still dabble in Genocide research. It's a horrific subject area so when I'm into a project I try and keep hobbies that aren't genocide adjacent and to take lots of breaks. Also, while it might be corny I see these histories as a voice for those who can't speak anymore and that gives me some comfort.

I studied the link between sex and genocide for a long while and it really messed with my head. I had been told by a good friend that therapy through grad school was a great idea, and so I took the advice. I still know a lore more than I ever wanted to, but I’m slowly dealing and moving along. It’s a lot to digest and have swirling around in your head all the time.

Yes.

Japanese war-crimes post 1800, especially during the second sino-japanese war and (obviously) WW II, allready took their toll on me during studying and are engraved in my brain since. Further studies got me to the point of questioning humanity in generall - stopped the work and still did not pick it up again.

I think the answer is going to be different for everyone, just because people experience and process things differently. Speaking for myself, as someone who studies the Holocaust for a living, I would say not really. I do occasionally have unpleasant dreams (e.g. being at Auschwitz or something like that) but I don't think it really affects my mood or mental well-being on a day to day basis.

I hate to put it this way, but at some point, you really do get desensitized to it. It never stops being horrifying, of course, but you do get used to it. As one of the witnesses Claude Lanzmann interviewed in Shoah put it, you really can get used to anything. I guess everyone has to get used to the unpleasant parts of their job: if you're a firefighter, you get used to seeing people's houses burn down; if you're a doctor (a real one), you get used to seeing people get sick and die; and so forth. I hope this doesn't make me sound callous or overly cynical, but you have to be able to create that mental separation from your work, or it'll be overwhelming for you, and I don't think that's unique to history.

Again, this is going to vary from person to person, because everyone is different. I don't think it reflects badly on someone as a person if they aren't as affected by it, nor do I think it reflects badly on someone's objectivity as a scholar if they are emotionally affected by their work. Reading and writing about atrocities should make you angry, or sad, or any combination of those. I guess that's the whole point really. Someone has to study and record this stuff, even if it is emotionally burdensome, sort of like The Giver, if you read that in school.

Not sure how allowed my answer will be, but I studied Political Science and Human Rights in university for three years. I also had PTSD prior to attending, and I found that reading about historic genocides triggered a very similar stress response to reminders of traumatic events I've actually experienced. I found myself constantly upset and drank a lot to cope with what I was reading and studying. I didn't finish my degree for various reasons.

It may be an anecdote, but as someone who has studied history both in my personal time and for classes, yes; these events can be very affecting, even if you have no real relation to them.

My PhD is in holocaust and genocide studies. I turned from work focusing on concentration camps in France and Europe to look at camps in North Africa. It’s still awful, but the situation in North Africa isn’t as mentally taxing to me. People were enslaved, imprisoned, and murdered but the industrialized machinery of mass murder like the Operation Reinhard camps isn’t in my research scope.

I’m nearing completion and still work in sprints so that I can take breaks. My advisor says one of the places where my work could use improvement is really grappling with weaving in the personal stories more with the institutional history. One of the reason there’s not more and I need to flesh that out is it’s much harder on me emotionally.

I'm not sure if my answer will be allowed since I'm not a historian - I study International Relations, actually, but the research I did as an undergrad was filled with history and law as well. In summary, I wanted to understand how gender and sex related crimes were classified (typified? Not sure, sorry, English is not my first language) internationally, and I used the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia as a main source. In order to understand international perception of rape in times of war, and to establish the ICTY as a dividing line in the international persecution of such crimes, I read a lot - and I mean A LOT - of indictments and sentencings. It was heart breaking, just... heart breaking. I was proud of the work I did by the end of it but, especially considering I was just starting to understand research, it was really, really to separate myself from what I was doing. Impossible, actually. My anxiety and and my depression got out of control, and it took me a long time to recover

Honestly ancient massacres (basically medieval and older) don't bother me much, not that I don't care about the victims, but it's easier to distance myaself from since it's very much in the past.

What always bothers me are modern atrocities. Now there are two factors of disgust to me, there is the atrocity itself which for example with the holocaust makes me feel sick every time. The other factor is how the culprits were dealt with. Reading about the trial of Adolf Eichmann helps, not really to feel better, but rather to feel relieved that there is justice in this world. This makes it ever so much harder to read about the ones going unpunished and even celebrated.

I hate that people like Tilly (a 30 years war warlord of the catholics) still has a statue today, none of the military leaders of that war should have statues. I mean what are we celebrating here? Then I read about the massacre of my lai and how only one soldier was convicted, immediately pardoned and even celebrated. I see A**faces that fly swastika flags and all that seriously bugs me.

In short I can deal with historical atrocities but I can't cope with culprits not being held accountable in the modern age.

I saw when you posted this and meant to reply sooner. It seems like a lot of responses are from people who have at some point touched on massacres or genocides as an aside to their main studies.

I’m currently working on my dissertation for grad school on colonial narratives in western media during the Rwandan genocide. I’ve written numerous essays regarding genocide including gender and genocide, collective memory and Auschwitz, US and UN and non-intervention in Rwanda, etc.

I specialise in genocide studies and my supervisor is Donald Bloxham, who co-edited the Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies and is the editor of the Journal of Holocaust Education. He’s written books on both the Holocaust and Armenian genocide and is one of the most well recognised scholars in the field.

Oftentimes when reading from the comfort of my home these events seem surreal and far away in both time and space, like another world. It is difficult, if not impossible, to comprehend the severity of it from just reading. But when you actually talk to people, you won’t forget it.

In Rwanda, signs of the genocide aren’t difficult to find. People missing limbs or having deep scars, and nearly everyone knows someone who was impacted by it. Many Hutu perpetrators- like many Serbians- insist a genocide never occurred. Many would do it again if they could, which is a terrifying prospect.

Sometimes what bothers me most isn’t empathising with pain at the individual and family level, but the seemingly pointlessness of this field of study. Governments and people knew the Rwandan genocide was unfolding, but no one tried to stop it. When France did anything at all it was to help the Hutu perpetrators. The US didn’t even want to use the word “genocide” because it might obligate them to “actually do something” (real quote from a since declassified state department legal document.)

So what’s the point? A ton of literature now exists on various aspects of genocide from what drives people to kill, what puts a region at risk of genocide, post-genocide justice, genocide and intervention, memory and genocide, and yet it still happens. If it happens in China, govs throw up their hands and say “we can’t do anything because it’s a state with nukes.” If it occurs in Africa people say “we can’t go there- it happens all the time and will just look like imperialism. We get nothing out of it.”

That dynamic makes everything a bit depressing for me. I feel like in the niche topic I’m studying- media portrayals of genocide and how they amplify colonial narratives- can possibly contribute something meaningful to the field. But there’s still an overwhelming sense that all of this is pointless, because genocide can continue unabated despite slogans like “never again.”

I have been doing a lot of research this year about British colonialism in South Asia. I also find writing about my research to be healing and cathartic. Although my research is often heartbreaking and I often need to take breaks to take care of myself, there is also something that feels almost healing just learning about things that have been covered up, ignored, and left out of mainstream accounts. Even when it’s painful it feels like puzzle pieces getting put into place or something. I saw someone else writing about compartmentalizing, suffering through, or getting desensitized to the pain of it, but for me it feels more like bearing witness.

Edited to respond directly to the mental health question: I have depression, but it is not a result of my research. I have had depressive episodes since my early teens and do not find that I have fewer or more frequent depressive episodes when I research atrocities. However, I do find that when I am in a depressive episode I need to take a break from some types of research- I just don’t have the emotional, energetic, or honestly physical capacity for it.

In Australia a few years ago, we had a Royal Commission into child sexual abuse. Archivists who provided records/evidence about children in state-run/state-sanctioned institutions (eg orphanages) found themselves struggling with mental health issues from the things that they saw in these records. They dubbed it ‘vicarious trauma’, and it’s been written about particularly by archivists like Nicola Laurent from the University of Melbourne and Michaela Hart of the Victorian Department of Health and Human Services (the current Victorian equivalent of children’s services/social services).

I am a jobbing historian in the heritage industry and I've studied and written on war and and the experience of war. My work doesn't particularly focus on the most horrific subjects like genocide, though I'm hardly ignorant of such things, and have actually become very interested recently in reading about the Holocaust. I'll give my two cents because I seem to be in the minority of respondents.

I've never really been emotionally affected by any of the awful things I have read about. I tend, in fact, to think emotion is not particularly helpful for a historian. Our job is firstly to find out what happened, and secondly to interpret it for a modern audience. Emotion might help with the second job, but it's unhelpful for the first, and if you can't do the first job properly there's not much point doing the second. A good example is the historiography of the First World War. A whole generation of historians in the 1960s let their outrage at the scale of death and destruction get in the way of rigorous historical analysis. They did a very good job of communicating their conclusions, but we now know those conclusions bore little relation to the way the war was experienced and understood by those who lived through it.

I think there are too many historians (or perhaps more accurately people who like to think of themselves as historians) who write as an evocation of their own (positive or negative) feelings about the subject, and lack scholarly detachment. I think a good historian is high on empathy but low on emotion. I think what makes me a good historian is a healthy detachment, but I don't feel I am suppressing my emotions to achieve that.

It's easy for me to be blasé. Writing about war tends more often that not to involve saying things were actually rather better, more rational, more understandable and more balanced in their negative and positive effects than most people assume. I don't have to deal with subjects where the more I learn, the worse the reality gets. I have the advantage that I (and my immediate ancestors) have had a very comfortable life, so nothing I have researched has resonated too closely with my personal experiences or background. I don't suffer from any mental health problems. The fact so many people throughout history have experienced such suffering makes me feel a deep sense of gratitude for the life I have. History provides countless arguments for living a good, generous, peaceful and happy life.

I am sometimes emotionally affected, in a good way, by the way archaeology can make you feel a connection with the real life of someone who lived hundreds or thousands of years ago, which I think is a very beautiful thing.

Genealogist and family history researcher here. It is painful to get deep into the personal lives of someone you are researching only to discover a tragedy. It feels oddly personal. Researching the descendants of people who were enslaved is so maddening. It's heartbreaking and infuriating. It so rattles the mind that you have to decompress. You have to cry. You have to talk to other researchers.

Many of the records relating to the postbellum south are or were until recently, unindexed records, which meant that you HAD to sift through hundreds or thousands of pages of tragedy to find a clue about the person you are researching.

In my experience, yes, it can. I'm at the student level and my specific topics aren't directly focused on genocide, but even reading certain books for class can be quite difficult. For me, the books that get me the most are focused on people who were in a particularly vulnerable situation without any outside support.

For example, I've benefitted greatly on a scholarly and personal level from taking courses about African American history, but it can get really heavy. Those are books I make an effort to prioritize reading so I don't have to skim them because trying to skim a book on racial violence feels disrespectful and also just leaves you with the impressions of violence, rather than the personal stories.

This is a very interesting question. I did my research in modern art where the artist was dying or had a terminal disease. For context I was born with a fatal lung disease and expected to live to 18 years. At the time I felt nothing. I was drawn to the topic but didn’t know why (or couldn’t face it). Now that my disease is no longer fatal and actually quite livable, I can’t do the work anymore. My areas of interest then were too dark for me now. Now I’m an archivist across a variety of disciplines so I have access to a much wider array of knowledge, both dark and light. I very much appreciate what my research gave me as a coping mechanism, but recognize it no longer carries the relevancy and interest it once did.

To throw my own, early modernist, hat into this ring as I've seen only a few replies dealing with older periods.

I studied the European Witchcraft for my MA, and honestly the period and tendancy for less testimonial evidence from accused/victims allows for a degree of distance. But we do still get surviving sources from their perspectives and they can be really quite gut-wrenching. I personally did not directly study the accounts of accused witches in the same depth as some of my peers who probably could answer this question much more interestingly than I.

However what really affected me, studying witchcraft from a political and religious angle, was the social forces at play and coming from a secondary education focused on the 21st Century it was mildly terrifying to trace the same broad spectrums of beliefs and attitudes back hundreds of years to find them causing people to commit atrocities and horrific punishments on their fellow humans.

It's somewhat hard to untangle largely unrelated mental health issues occurring concurrently, but that o doubt the undercurrent of disillusionment with societal forces was particularly helpful.

On a lighter note however, I also studied faerie beliefs and other folklore belief as part of the wider context, and that for 100% sure caused me to stop reading (and writing) most types of fantasy for a little while.

Secondary or vicarious trauma is a relatively well-understood phenomenon in psychotherapy and for first responders, but less so for historians. If it's permitted, this article breaks down some of our (limited) current understanding of vicarious trauma for historians. It touches on Chang's story, but only really as a starting point for the discussion.

I focused a lot in my undergrad and in grad-school on the Holocaust. I've always been interested in the intersection of great human tragedy and music so I spent a lot of time researching and reading about horrific things. I've had depression for years but that started way before university.

In all seriousness it's something that you just kinda grow used to. It's obviously still horrifying and still incenses you, but when you learn about these things as facts they're a little easier to digest. This doesn't mean that they can't be jarring at times or can't upset you, its just easier to handle than going into it as someone who doesn't read about atrocities a couple hours a day 7 days a week.

Those who find themselves unable to get to this level typically don't go on to study the subject matter further.