Forgive the bluntness, and speaking as someone who knows 4chan all too well, and is a paramedic:
goatse is one thing. We're more talking high definition videos of people being beheaded by Mexican drug cartels, people being held down while dogs eat their genitals. Videos of toddlers being raped.
You can't really compare that to a fairly mundane, if explicit, naked man showing his anus.
Also, as a paramedic, and speaking for many that I know (though not all, of course) - trauma is rarely (or a lot less) PTSD inducing. Gruesome, gory, sure, but in the end it's all blood and tissue. What gets to most of the people I know is the emotional violence - being called to child sexual assault cases, accidental deaths, things like that, that take the toll.
Thank you for your service to the community as a paramedic. I have no idea how you people do it.
As someone who has exposure to that world, how do you do deal with it? Is there some kind of training or protocol or therapy that's built in to your job that's different than that of the moderators? Does any of the mitigation even work?
For every one of those beheading videos, someone has to actually go collect the head. I would think that must be orders of magnitude more traumatizing than skipping through the video of it happening enough to flag it.
It's a very good question, because for the longest time, paramedics/EMTs/firefighters -were- expected to just "suck it up".
Now, with increases in the protection of our PPE (bunker gear, etc.) and other knowledge, there are less line of duty deaths due to accident or illness (typically cancer, though that's still a big one) - now the biggest cause is suicide, mostly as a result of PTSD.
There's a documentary that was funded in part by Denis Leary called "Burn: A Year in the Frontlines in the Battle to Save Detroit", talking about fire departments there. One of the veterans says "I wish my mind could forget what my eyes have seen".
Around here, the PNW, at least, there's a huge movement toward handling it proactively, access to counseling, therapy, hotlines, and as importantly as anything else, active efforts to remove the stigma associated with things.
We used to do CISDs (critical incident stress debriefings), which are now largely discredited - essentially "put everyone in a room and 'make' them talk about how they feel after a bad call, whether they want to or not", but now, more and more departments are hiring full-time mental health professionals. One near me has someone who specializes in PTSD, and another who works with sleep regulation (all those alarms in the middle of the night), and alcohol/drug use.
goatse is one thing. We're more talking high definition videos of people being beheaded by Mexican drug cartels, people being held down while dogs eat their genitals. Videos of toddlers being raped.
You can't really compare that to a fairly mundane, if explicit, naked man showing his anus.
Also, as a paramedic, and speaking for many that I know (though not all, of course) - trauma is rarely (or a lot less) PTSD inducing. Gruesome, gory, sure, but in the end it's all blood and tissue. What gets to most of the people I know is the emotional violence - being called to child sexual assault cases, accidental deaths, things like that, that take the toll.