Use of dark humour as a coping mechanism

For my first shift as a student paramedic, I was eager to impress. I arrived early and sat in the crew room until my mentor appeared. As the night crews returned to station and the morning crews turned up for their shifts, jobs from the past 12 hours were being discussed and one of them had been particularly difficult. To my surprise, after describing the job, the attending crew began to joke about it rather crudely. I remained quiet, but after seeing my widened eyes, a more experienced student paramedic informed me that I'd soon get used to it.

As the placement weeks passed, I did become accustomed to the so-called dark humour, otherwise known as gallows humour, used on a regular basis; but I struggled to understand why it was part of paramedic culture. I had been told it was a genuine coping mechanism for dealing with emotionally challenging jobs, but I wasn't sure if that was just an excuse used to justify an old-fashioned tradition of the ambulance service. I couldn't comprehend how using comedy to diminish the seriousness of trauma and fatalities could be appropriate. If I had been a relative of the patients involved in these jobs, I'd be astonished at the callous nature of health professionals. Then I went to my first job that required a debrief from a team leader, and began to appreciate the need for dark humour.