gallows humor

Those who work with human trauma often use humor to handle job stressors. Research has demonstrated that lighthearted humor is related to lower secondary traumatic stress scores, while gallows humor has the inverse relationship. This work explores how three types of humor relate to secondary traumatic stress: (a) humor at the expense of victims, (b) humor at the expense of offenders, and (c) humor containing sexual innuendo. Internet crimes against children taskforce personnel completed questionnaires about secondary traumatic stress and coping techniques...

This paper argues that "backstage" gallows humor among clinical mentors not only affects medical students' perceptions of what it means to be a doctor but is also symptomatic and indicative of a much larger problem in medicine-namely, the failure to attend fully to the complexity and profundity of the lived experiences of illness, suffering, and death. Reorienting the discourse surrounding gallows humor away from whether or in what context it is acceptable and toward the reasons why doctors feel the need to use such humor in the first place addresses this issue in a more illuminating way...

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Professionals in the area of sexual violence often use humor, both lighthearted and gallows humor, in an attempt to counteract the effects of the work on their well-being. There is little research, however, on whether the use of humor is effective in reducing symptoms of secondary traumatic stress. In the current study, more than 500 Internet Crimes Against Children task force personnel were surveyed about their level of secondary traumatic stress and the coping techniques utilized to mitigate work-related stressors...

Medical professionals regularly joke about their patients' problems. Some of these jokes are clearly wrong, but are all jokes wrong?

BACKGROUND: Humour is a complex phenomenon, incorporating cognitive, emotional, behavioural, physiological and social aspects. Research to date has concentrated on reviewing (rehearsed) humour and 'healthy' individuals via correlation studies using personality-trait based measurements, principally on psychology students in laboratory conditions. Nurses are key participants in modern healthcare interactions however, little is known about their (spontaneous) humour use. AIMS: A middle-range theory that accounted for humour use in CNS-patient interactions was the aim of the study...

Types of humor as used by crisis interveners and first responders to emergency situations will be reviewed. Various disciplines, authors, researchers, and practitioners will be cited to help explain and clarify issues related to the use of humor in such situations and settings. The main focus is on the use of humor as a cognitive and/or behavioral coping strategy which is considered by many to be a reaction to stress events. The article proposes a model including progressive steps of humor, ranging from a respectful to a sarcastic...

The purpose of this study was to develop a grounded theory about the joking behaviors of psychiatric unit staff. Fifty nine staff members (Male = 23, Female = 36), ages 28-62, who worked in an urban, public facility were observed in unit meetings over a two year period. Data were analyzed using the constant comparative method. Participants used aberrant humor to deal with the basic social process of facing a series of ultimately unresolvable problems. The factors involved included the organizational context of the working environment, contact with a stigmatized patient group, and stressful staff-patient interactions which led to the erosion of a sense of professional competence and the resulting demoralization, resentment, and vengeful counteraction...

Social workers can learn much about the uses of humor from workers in the turbulent and fast-paced atmosphere of a large city hospital emergency room in which it flourishes. This article illustrates staff use of five varieties of humor in this stressful and sometimes dangerous setting: (1) tension-relieving nonsense, (2) play on words, (3) sense of the preposterous and incongruous, (4) gallows humor, and (5) foolish jest. Above all, this article discusses the ability to endure day after day the occurrence of unspeakable trauma...

The social practices surrounding diagnosis and management decisions are analyzed from a sociological perspective as occupational rituals. These rituals are part of rounds and conferences, and they assist physicians in managing uncertainty, making treatment decisions, and evaluating outcomes. Physicians use eight key strategies to manage uncertainty: hedged assertions, probability reasoning, a focus on uncertainty as a research problem, requests for consultations, Socratic teaching, deciding not to decide, gallows humor, and hyperrealism...

Gallows humor, as depicted in television shows such as MASH and Hill Street Blues, fulfills important psychological and sociological functions in maintaining therapeutic attitudes in the stressful and sometimes dangerous milieu of a maximum-security psychiatric unit. Humor provides an emotional language with which the unit's staff mark the sense of incongruity that characterizes their work. Staff invoke humor to move away from a macho attitude in their interactions with aggressive patients. Humor also bolsters staff solidarity through playful inversions of the usual patterns of authority...